Spring 2004 - The Rest Is Noise

Transcription

A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin | Number Eight | Spring 2004
The Berlin Journal
Stephen Max Kellen
Berlin 1914 – New York 2004
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The Berlin Journal
Number Eight | Spring 2004
Were He Still Here
If only Stephen Kellen could have experienced another semester at the
Hans Arnhold Center. He would have been as engrossed as he had been
during his last visit in May 2002, when he sat rapt in the first row listening
to Walter Laqueur lecture on terrorism. The breadth of his curiosity was
remarkable. He relished regular contact with his vast collection of Berlin
friends and followed the Academy’s program closely from a distance. This
spring he would have wanted to hear every detail of the visits of three veteran Middle East experts. I can imagine the pleasure he would have taken in
hearing the Scharoun Ensemble play compositions by Lukas Foss, how he
would have conversed with Michael Geyer about nationalism, and how he
would have listened attentively to Tom Geoghegan’s social prognoses. We
were blessed to have him as long as we did, but we wish he were still here to
cheer us on.
–Gary Smith
A Magazine from the Hans Arnhold Center
Published twice a year by the American Academy in Berlin
Number Eight – Spring 2004
Editor Gary Smith
Co- Editor Miranda Robbins
Design Susanna Dulkinys and United Designers Network
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All rights reserved ISSN 1610-6490
THE
AMERICAN
ACADEMY
IN BERLIN
Hans Arnhold Center
Trustees of the American Academy
Honorary Chairmen
Thomas L. Farmer
Henry A. Kissinger
Richard von Weizsäcker
Chairman
Richard C. Holbrooke
Vice Chairman
Gahl Hodges Burt
President
Robert H. Mundheim
Treasurer
Karl M. von der Heyden
Trustees
Gahl Hodges Burt
Diethart Breipohl
Gerhard Casper
Lloyd N. Cutler
Thomas L. Farmer
Julie Finley
Vartan Gregorian
William A. Haseltine
Jon Vanden Heuvel
Dieter von Holtzbrinck
Josef Joffe
Stephen M. Kellen †
Henry A. Kissinger
Horst Köhler
John C. Kornblum
Otto Graf Lambsdorff
Nina von Maltzahn
Deryck Maughan
Klaus Mangold
Erich Marx
Wolfgang Mayrhuber
Robert H. Mundheim
Joseph Neubauer
Franz Xaver Ohnesorg
Robert C. Pozen
Volker Schlöndorff
Fritz Stern
Kurt Viermetz
Alberto W. Vilar
Klaus Wowereit, ex officio
04 Remembering Stephen Kellen The Academy commemorates the life
of its great benefactor, friend, and mentor, Stephen Max Kellen. Our
issue begins with a bouquet of memoirs by Robert Mundheim, Richard
Holbrooke, Anabelle Garrett, Gary Smith, Henry Arnhold, Leslie Gelb,
Andrew Gundlach, Nina von Maltzahn, and Marina Kellen French.
13 W. S. DiPiero “A Cold June”
14 The Prospects of Partnership: Developing Strategies for the Middle East
Three seasoned diplomats present their views.
16 Dennis Ross, Clinton’s chief negotiator at Camp David in 2000, applies the
lessons of Iraq to Israel’s announced withdrawal from Gaza. If you wait until
the “day after” to plan a transition of power, you have waited too long.
20 Edward Djerejian, after four decades in the diplomatic corps, is struck by
the carpet of satellite dishes stretching from the Marrakesh medina to Kabul
and Karachi. Throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, America’s intentions
are being hotly debated on television, radio, and satellite. How can the US join
the discussion?
23 Martin Indyk understands the complex interdependencies among Middle
Eastern factors, the delicate balance between a whole and its parts. The former
diplomat looks back upon the mistakes of the last two US administrations and
forward to a four-part strategy for positive transformation in the region.
27 Notebook of the Academy: News about our trustees, fellowships, programs,
and alumni
32 Life and Letters: People and projects at the Hans Arnhold Center
36 On the Waterfront: What they are writing about us – including a Christmas
present from the New York Times, a short profile of Berlin-born composer Lukas
Foss, and a column by David Warsh on fellow Academy fellow Hope Harrison.
40 Michael Geyer describes the catastrophic effects of German nationalism in two
world wars.
45 Thomas Geoghegan shows the connection between the collapse of unions,
healthcare, and government regulation, and America’s litigation madness.
49 W. S. Di Piero “Didn’t You Say Desire Is?”
50 Alex Ross describes the premiere that brought toute Vienne to Graz in 1906.
54 Elizabeth McCracken “Ode to a Fifth-Grade Teacher”
+ Work by artists Xu Bing and Reynold Reynolds
Berlin 1914 – NewYork 2004
4
Photograph by Annette Hornischer
Stephen Max Kellen
High Standards Were His Hallmark
O
n february 11, 2004, Stephen Kellen passed
away, and the American Academy in Berlin
lost its greatest friend and supporter.
My grandfather was a great collector
– of ideas, art, and cherished friends.
What my family learned on his passing
was that he was also an extraordinary
collector of quotations. Much to our
surprise, we found them squirreled
away everywhere; his pockets, wallet,
and drawers were filled with scraps of
paper. They never left his side.
Stephen had three great loves: his wife and
constant companion of nearly 64 years,
Anna-Maria, the city of his birth, Berlin,
and the city he adopted, New York. As he was fond of saying,
»I became a very good New Yorker but have always remained
a good Berliner.« The American Academy embodies these
three loves. The Academy’s Berlin home is the house in which
Anna-Maria grew up and where she lived when Stephen
courted her. The Academy was founded on the idea that it
would be a living bridge between two communities about
which Stephen cared deeply. It would be a bridge for people,
including, importantly young people, and for ideas bringing
Germany and America closer together and enriching both.
Stephen gave every encouragement for the Academy to grow
quickly into the role he envisioned for it. But as it grew (sometimes even more rapidly than he expected), he admonished us
– in another of his favorite phrases – »quality, not quantity«
must be our touchstone. High standards were a hallmark for
all of Stephen’s activities.
Although we will miss Stephen’s energy, focus, judgment and
continual thoughtful help, he has left us a very lively institution which bears his stamp and keeps reminding us how fortunate we are to have had him as a great friend.
– Robert Mundheim
– Anabelle Garrett
“I believe in love
and work, and their
linkage. I believe
that we are neither
angels nor devils,
but humans, with
clusters of potentials
in both directions.
I am neither an
optimist nor a
pessimist but
a possibilist.”
– Max Lerner
The Berlin Journal
5
Remembering
Stephen Kellen
S
tephen Kellen was a great man.
He would have been surprised
by this statement, because he
never sought personal recognition for his
achievements, and, indeed, was, by temperament and upbringing, incapable of
such thinking about himself. But, having known a few people who were truly
great – and many who thought they were
– I believe that Stephen fulfilled the characteristics of greatness. While he maintained, to the very end, a lively interest
in the affairs of the world around him,
Stephen probably saw himself primarily
as an observer of events.
Well, in this respect, although in few
others, Stephen was wrong. In fact, in
every area in which he took an interest,
Stephen made a real difference. His impact
on the music world, and on the city of New
York, was obvious and undeniable. So, too,
his firm commitment to the Council on
Foreign Relations.
But it was the American Academy
in Berlin – the project that brought me
together with him and Anna-Maria – that
turned out to be the most enduring legacy
of his philanthropic work. One of his favorite phrases – I can hear him saying it now
in his precise, don’t-argue-with-me manner, was “I am a good New Yorker and a
good Berliner.” The American Academy in
Berlin gave him and Anna-Maria a chance
to create a tangible link between the city of
their birth and the city that they had made
their home for over sixty years.
I need to be as precise here as Stephen
always was, as Stephen would expect.
When he said “Berlin” he meant Berlin,
and not, he made clear, Germany. Not
that he opposed the long postwar effort
to rebuild Germany; on the contrary, he
played an important role in this effort.
But he did so out of a conviction that
it was in our national interests to create a stable and democratic Germany.
Berlin was something else – his home,
even though it had rejected him and so
many others in the 1930s. This was clear
in a remarkable piece of symbolism – his
insistence on always staying at the Hotel
Kempinski because it was located on the
site of the house in which he had grown
up. By the end, of course, Berlin had
embraced him again and even given him
its highest award.
The circumstances that brought us
together as collaborators and friends are
6
known to many. Allow me to recall it
once more.
We began with an idea: to create a permanent American presence in Berlin as the
storied Berlin brigade left the city it had
protected throughout the cold war. Henry
Kissinger, Richard von Weizsäcker, and
Tom Farmer joined me in announcing the
idea on September 9, 1994, the day after
the last American troops left the city. But it
was only an idea. No building.
No money.
We finally found a building, a large
villa on the Wannsee – not the Villa on the
Wannsee, but a beautiful old building that
had, in its lifetime, been taken over by
Hitler, ransacked by the Russians in 1945,
and served as the American military recreation center during the cold war. The
German government offered it to us, but it
was a run-down mess, unusable.
Then came the miracle moment. We
discovered that the villa had been the
childhood home of Anna-Maria Kellen,
whose father, Hans Arnhold, was one of
Germany’s leading bankers before the
Nazis came to power.
My call on the Kellens at their home
in 1996 changed all of our lives. Entering
their Park Avenue apartment for the first
time, being served those small triangular
pieces of pumpernickel laden with smoked
salmon, looking at the spectacular art,
including a Salvador Dali portrait of
Anna-Maria’s mother, surrounded by
silver-framed family portraits from another
continent and another century, I somehow felt at home immediately. Perhaps it
was because I too had come from a family
background steeped in a Mitteleuropa sensibility. I felt as though I was back with my
grandparents in Zurich, or my great-grandmother in long-ago summers in Sils Maria.
The Kellens had been born in the 1910s, but
their values and roots went back much further, into the nineteenth century. Stephen’s
immense dignity, his ramrod straight back,
his perfect manners, his discipline and
iron will cloaked in the modesty of an oldworld sensibility – all this was quite unforgettable in the modern world. I remember
once, in Berlin, the head of the Prussian
Historical Society – and you can imagine
what that means – said to me, after listening to Stephen and Anna-Maria speaking
German, “You know, no one still speaks
German the way they do. It is an experience
just to listen to them.”
Richard Holbrooke
Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen, and Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke at the second
New Traditions conference in Berlin in 1998.
Stephen was not modern in any sense
of the word. Yet he was always open to
new ideas and encouraging young people
whom he well knew lived with values and
a style completely different from the one
that had been hard-wired into him early
in life.
And so he and Anna-Maria made
the decision to support the American
Academy – not just in a small way but
with a massive gift that would enable us
to rebuild completely the inside of AnnaMaria’s childhood home while maintaining its essential character. From that time
on, the Kellens and the other descendants of Hans Arnhold have been the central reason for the success of the American
Academy in Berlin.
Stephen, always a stickler for precision,
wanted to put Anna-Maria forward, since
it was her childhood home, not his. So at
the Academy’s inaugural in 1998, he insisted that she, and she alone, speak. Stephen
stood quietly to the side, a faint, shy smile
concealing a deep pleasure just showing
on the surface, as Germans greeted him.
They were virtually speechless in the face
of such an extraordinary gesture of reconciliation, if not quite forgiveness, and their
inability to express themselves masked,
but only slightly, their indescribably complex reaction to his generosity. Then AnnaMaria spoke, eloquently and movingly, of
her childhood in the rooms and gardens
that were now so magnificently restored,
as Stephen quietly watched her, his eyes
glistening with emotion and pride.
But behind Anna-Maria and the whole
family was always this man – so stern on
the outside, so caring underneath, with
a vision of a future that he well knew he
would not see. But as we say goodbye to
Stephen Kellen, we should also say that his
vision will survive, and will succeed. New
Yorkers are proud that he chose to live in
and give so much to their city. And Berlin
is remarkably fortunate that he could see
beyond the horrors that had driven him
from Germany over sixty years ago, and
leave behind, in the city of his birth, something so enduring, a symbol of his vision
that will last for a very long time. This is
our pledge to Stephen and Anna-Maria
and the family. Because of their vision
and generosity, I am confident it will survive us all as a permanent link between
the two cities that formed the arc of his
extraordinary life.
Q
Man the Measure
Gary Smith
S
ix weeks ago I sat in The Kitchen, one
of these dark experimental spaces
somewhere in the Chelsea district of
Manhattan, in order to see a rock “tragicomedy” written and illustrated by a legendary, quirky cartoonist who had been
at the Academy. In the intermission, I surveyed the list of The Kitchen’s benefactors on the photocopied pamphlet which
served as a program (admittedly a professional vice), and there they were: Anna Maria and Stephen M. Kellen, the surest
seal of excellence any New York cultural
institution could display.
Their interests encompassed both the
larger-than-life Berlin Philharmonic and
the humble Third Street Music School
Settlement on the Lower East Side. Their
zeal was always for excellence and never
for personal recognition. Stephen’s charm
was that of the discreet philanthropist,
the respectful mentor who was generous
in counsel but also allowed his charges to
make their own mistakes. (In this respect,
Stephen is uncannily like Bob Mundheim,
the Academy’s presiding mentor, even
though Mundheim is from Hamburg – not
yet part of greater Berlin.)
Stephen Kellen was that rare benefactor who is allergic to intrusiveness and
thus all the more influential. He never
tired of urging what I thought of as his
three E’s: excellence, economy, and enthusiasm. Quality, he intimated, can only be
assured by keeping things manageable,
and success implies unflagging dynamism. After lunches or lectures on the
Wannsee, Stephen would be one of the
last to leave and would sit as long as possible in quiet conversations with Academy
fellows, staff, or other guests.
As so many have pointed out here, his
appetite for dialogue was inexhaustible.
Every few weeks brought reports of a conversation with one or another German
politician passing through, whether
Joschka Fischer, Angela Merkel, or a postcommunist member of the Bundestag.
He inquired just as eagerly of Americans
returning from Berlin like Daniel
Libeskind or Roger Cohen.
Stephen’s curiosity was dialectical –
simultaneously probing and edifying. Its
effect on his interlocutors was as indelible
as it was diplomatic. I kept running into
people whose lives he had affected. Many
came to the Academy, like the von der
Planitzes or Bredows, or the cultivated
woman my son and I happened to meet
on a bus making the rounds of Berlin
museums, whom he had impressed after
only a few conversations.
Many of us will miss those weekly telephone calls, Stephen’s careful and discrete questioning about life in Berlin. He
was somehow always better informed
about life in the city of his birth than
many Berliners. After answering all his
questions, I always wanted to keep him
on the line as long as I could in order to
tap into that vast store of wisdom.
the superb cellist to fly to New York that
day, where he played Bach and Casals with
luminous virtuosity between the encomia
memorializing Stephen’s life.
But this tale has a preface: In the salonlike gatherings in the home of Hans
and Ludmilla Arnhold, where Stephen
first met and later courted his future
wife Anna-Maria, another great cellist,
Gregor Piatigorsky occasionally played,
once even with Casals. As that story goes,
Piatigorsky, having arrived in Berlin, first
barely subsisted by playing a shabby borrowed instrument in a Russian bar, where
he was discovered by a friend of Hans
Arnhold’s. The result was true to form:
Piatigorsky needed a proper cello, and
Stephen’s future father-in-law provided
it; all the more fitting that a Piatigorsky
pupil, Georg Faust, should play his tribute to the son-in-law at that Manhattan
memorial gathering.
I
will always cherish the feeling of déjà
vu I experienced the first time I visited Stephen and Anna-Maria Kellen.
What had drawn me to Berlin was biographically-grounded, from summer visits to New York with my great aunts from
Königsberg and their presents of Mörike
and Heine to precious weeks spent in the
book-lined apartment of Gershom and
Fania Scholem in Rehavia. These were
worlds that no longer existed in Germany
but could still be experienced in New York
and in Jerusalem. It was not necessarily
Jewish – how many families had been baptized in previous generations? – and yet its
mores were as unmistakeable as its cosmopolitanism. The wealth of books surrounding the Klees and Feiningers in the Kellen
home signified a respect for the word as
well as love of visual art.
My fainter memories of the Scholems
and of my own relations are of resolute integrity (not to mention a heavilyBerlinesque English), but it was Stephen
Kellen who gave me real insight into that
milieu. Their world was shaped by an
appreciation, if not admiration, for the
best of what those heady years in Berlin
brought forth in the arts, scholarship,
and industry. It became determined
by the measure of character demanded
by the vicissitudes of the trials that followed. In the case of Stephen Kellen, his
life forged a character compelling in its
probity and curiosity.
O
ne of the most perplexing
questions remains why a person
who was forced to leave National
Socialist Germany would devote his life to
rebuilding that very country and especially
devote so much philanthropic passion to
the re-civilization of the city of his birth.
Very few émigrés looked back in anything
but anger and abhorrence. I asked one
of the few who returned, the venerable
91-year old Berliner Ernst Cramer, with
whom Stephen had established a fond
relationship in recent years. He attributed
the decades of his devotion to building
the Springer publishing house in postwar
Berlin to two things: a sense of gratitude
and responsibility to the country he grew
up in.
Stephen was blissfully unaware of his
greatness, and we can understand somewhat better the character of a man who
exemplified Churchill’s well-known ideal:
“The price of greatness is responsibility.”
A
s the cavernous rotunda of St.
John’s Cathedral on Amsterdam
and 112th Street gradually filled at
last month’s memorial tribute to Stephen,
it became clear once again that he had
touched many lives. Present were three
of four generations of bankers, industrialists, and the politically minded, as well
as artists, educators, journalists, and, not
least, Germanophiles – just a fraction of
the New Yorkers and Berliners who shared
an admiration for Stephen Kellen. Each of
those six or seven hundred who were there
signified a relationship, a story or subplot
in Stephen’s life. Even Georg Faust, the
magnificent principal cellist of the Berlin
Philharmonic who performed there stood
for the many ways in which Stephen’s life
intersected with those of others. Stephen
loved the Berlin Philharmonic, and spoke
admiringly of Georg Faust, which moved
The Berlin Journal
7
Friendship in Partnership
Henry Arnhold
I
Q
8
first met Stephen in 1942. He was 27,
he was married to my cousin AnnaMaria, he was a young father, and
he was a full-fledged banker. I was twenty, and would spend the next years in the
US Army. On occasion, when I had a 3day pass and was able to get to New York,
Anna-Maria and Stephen were my generous hosts at their home.
Stephen first trained at the respected
Berliner Handelsgesellschaft in his native
Berlin. He then spent some time at Lazard
Brothers in London. In 1936 he immigrated to the United States and found a job at
Carl M. Loeb, where he worked for two
entrepreneurial young partners, Harold
Linder and Bill Golden, both of whom
became his lifelong friends. In 1940 Hans
Arnhold, his father-in-law, drafted him to
help build an investment banking business in New York. The Arnhold Family
had recently founded Arnhold and S.
Bleichroeder, Inc. to keep alive its long
established tradition as bankers after having been forced to abandon its banking
firms, Arnhold Brothers, in Dresden and
Berlin, where it had played a leading role
in financing German industry and international trade.
After my discharge from the Army in
1946, my Uncle Hans also drafted me.
Stephen helped me to get the needed Wall
Street back-office training in the firm
of his friend, Irving Kahn. On January
1, 1947, 57 years ago, I joined him at
Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder. Stephen
and I shared a large room with two traders, a ticking NYSE ticker tape, our economist, and a secretary – my learning experience started. After three months,
I took a day off – I had just gotten engaged
and wanted to help my fiancée shop for
our forthcoming wedding. The next day
Stephen sharply reprimanded me: if I
thought that I could have extra privileges
just because I was a family member, I was
in the wrong place. For Stephen, being a
member of the Family meant having extra
responsibilities. In his long career his attitude never changed – duty and responsibility came first. With his associates he
was conscious of his position as a leader.
He had a disciplined approach to everything and, even as we grew, each day he
would circulate through each department checking with both his chiefs
and his clerks. He knew most individual
employees.
He had an amazing recall for all that
mattered, with a deep understanding of
all aspects of the business, including each
footnote in the balance sheet.
He may have appeared very stiff and
strict, as he carried himself erect and was
very conservative in his dress. Even on
the hottest summer days he would never
remove his jacket. He was always appreciative of good manners, and many employees not only respected him but were somewhat intimidated by him. But, they soon
learned that their welfare and problems
he considered as his problems. He would
go out of his way to help them by applying the same methodical approach as was
his nature to any solution. Many people
owe him very much, certainly not least
the broadly dispersed Arnhold Family.
Without him our firm would never have
prospered as it did. Back in the early postwar years until the 1950s, even today’s
giants Goldman Sachs and Morgan
Stanley had at most two hundred employ-
by the results, it must have been a good
recipe. I am more impulsive and sometimes would raise a half-baked idea.
Stephen would always say, “the devil is in
the details,” and of course he was right.
When Stephen was asked by friends and
clients for advice or his opinion he would
often say, “I am cautiously optimistic,”
which some thought was a clever hedged
response. I have thought about it lately,
and I am convinced that these four words
– “I am cautiously optimistic” – actually
characterize the secret of his success. They
truly reflect Stephen’s character and the
methodical and disciplined approach in
his decision making – his caution, his careful analysis, his willingness to spend time
and resources to improve the odds that
he would reach the right decision, and his
perseverance to follow up.
His concern that an error could lead
to an unanticipated loss far exceeded his
eagerness for huge profit opportunities.
He was never a speculator.
“The devil is in the details.”
ees. International communications were
mostly coded telegrams and poor telephone connections. I remember interesting transactions in which Stephen’s friend
the legendary Ben Graham and his partner
Jerry Newman joined with us.
Hans Arnhold wished that we should
remain small – not quantity but quality
worked fine. We always watched our overhead. I can remember one occasion, when
we had big mail bags full of Mexican Eagle
bearer shares, we enlisted Stephen’s wife
Anna-Maria and my wife Sissy to clip coupons – we enjoyed having them visit us in
the office.
Like traditional bankers, we were always
conscious of our reputation, our name –
we considered this our most important
asset. Stephen helped us to solidify our
standing and to gain respect within the
Wall Street and banking communities by
his stature and professionalism. Thanks
to our firm’s European background and
historic relations, we were able to build
a franchise in international securities,
which in time became a very active business. Stephen was a particularly skilled
and diplomatic negotiator – he loved to
solve complex problems, which others had
failed to solve. He called it his hobby – a
typical understatement. It required a lot of
work and ingenuity. He developed important relationships in particular with many
leading German industrial firms, and he
advised them in their expansion to the US.
For more than fifty years we shared a
partnership based on mutual trust – both
of us could commit the firm individually,
which neither would do if the other would
have objected. We were very different
in many respects. We often approached
issues from different angles. But, judging
He enjoyed games of chance but only if
he could intellectually measure the odds.
You could trust his judgment. He had a
sharp pencil, but at the same time Stephen
was most generous when it could further
a cause or avoid a hardship to others.
He gave much to so many people in his
leadership position in the firm and in
the industry.
I have talked mainly about Stephen at
work – others will describe him as a devoted husband, father, grandfather and proud
great-grandfather, about his contribution
to broader society and as a philanthropist.
Being in his company was always stimulating; his interests and knowledge were
so manifold, and until the end, he was an
activist and a doer.
Stephen and I have shared a lot of good
times and a lot of challenges over many
decades – gratefully, for a much longer
time than the generations preceding us.
For 64 years he served the shareholders,
the associates and the clients of Arnhold
and S. Bleichroeder with extraordinary
devotion and care. We will miss his wise
counsel and his strong presence, but all of
us can reflect fondly on his great contribution to our lives. He was my partner and
my friend.
Decisively Generous
Leslie Gelb
T
I
played a very small part in Stephen’s
life; he loomed large in mine. I kept
him abreast of foreign policy talk and
gossip. He made possible a dream for the
Council on Foreign Relations – to involve
younger Americans more deeply in the
foreign policies of their country.
As the famous German poet Richard
Holbrooke – I mean, Heinrich Heine –
once opined: “In the end, God will forgive
us all. That’s his business.” For Stephen
Kellen, God will have little to forgive. And
God will soon discover that business with
Stephen can be conducted very quickly.
Stephen was a gentleman and a pleasure. He was rightly known as a great
philanthropist, and I might say, he made
begging bearable. Many people and organizations owe an enormous debt to him.
And as many of us can tell you, Stephen
was the easiest person to ask for help. He
either said, “Yes,” or “No,” or “I’ll think
about it for a couple of days and get back
to you.” There was no fuss, no bother,
and little begging. If he said he’d get back
to you in two days, he would be on the
telephone to you within 48 hours to the
minute.
In many ways, Stephen lived more in
the past and in the future, less so in the
present. He did not get bogged down in the
present. Nor did he agonize intellectually
about current political affairs. It was either
“That’s right,” or “That’s ridiculous,” or
“I don’t know,” or “Nobody knows.”
Stephen was not restrained by great
doubt. The past represented culture, and
beauty, civilization, and standards. Yes,
standards. And he gave so much to maintain those standards, the culture and the
beauty. The present was for hard work,
for fun, and for creating the wealth to help
fund remembrances of the good things
past and the future.
It was in the future that Stephen’s life
and mine really intermingled. The future
for him was about youth and hope. And
the future for us at the Council on Foreign
Relations was tied to bringing about the
greater involvement of some of our more
talented young Americans in thinking
about the world and about US foreign
policy.
I went to Stephen on behalf of the
Council, of which he was a longtime member. I told him of the goal to commit to
the young, put forward by our chairman
Peter Peterson, vice chairman Maurice
Greenberg, and myself. Typically, Stephen
asked, “How old are these young people?”
I said roughly 25–35 years of age. “What
do they do at the Council?” Listen to smart
people and discuss matters among themselves. “I’ll get back to you in two days,”
and he did, and thus began a program
that goes forward under the name of the
Stephen M. Kellen Term Membership
Program.
Stephen used to come to the meetings of these younger people. He would
sit without moving a muscle for an hour,
concentrating. Afterward, he would say
to me things like: “They listen too much
to Henry Kissinger and not enough to
themselves.” Or, “Many of these younger
women are very beautiful, but not so beautiful as the older women.”
Anna-Maria reminded me the other
day that Stephen believed in God. I believe
that Stephen is in heaven and that in his
first conversation with God he will say
something like, “We should fix things up a
little around here, no?” Stephen still looms
large in our lives.
Leslie H. Gelb is President Emeritus of the
Council on Foreign Relations.
The Berlin Journal
9
I
n the family, my grandfather was
known as Dodo – a nickname given
to him by his sister. Dodo would have
been truly surprised and very grateful
for such a wonderful showing of love and
respect. Indeed, he might have wondered
which great man is being honored here,
as he sought neither fame, nor adulation,
nor honors, nor even greatness in the common sense of the word. For him, a great life
was being actively involved in worthwhile
causes; it was making a positive contribution to the world around him; it was doing
things right, doing things fairly, with high
ethics and great attention to detail. Most
of all, it was doing things in partnership
with people whom he respected, in whom
he saw potential and whom he trusted. It
certainly was never his intention to make
his life an example for us all, but he did
just that.
First, in the business world and on Wall
Street. For three summers in high school,
I was a summer intern at Arnhold and
S. Bleichroeder. So my grandfather was
my first boss, and at an early age, I had a
glimpse of him at work.
For him, there was something noble
about being in the investment banking
and money management businesses; they
were an extension of his personality and
God-given desire to help people, providing
him a way to solve people’s strategic corporate problems and to help them build and
create wealth through wise investing.
When I worked at A&SB, my grandfather seemed omnipresent. I asked repeatedly over the summers, “Does my grandfather always come to this part of the firm
on a daily basis by telephone, or is he just
checking up on me?” The answer I got
was always the same: “Mr. Kellen stops
by every day.” On summer holidays, my
grandfather also checked in daily by telephone – usually just before dinner. When
the other end picked up, he would say,
“Kellen. How are you? How are we?” I
asked once why it was so important for
him to call in every single day. His reply
was “I like keeping my finger on the pulse.”
My grandfather knew only one kind of
management, and that was “Hands-On
Management.” And he had little time for
people who didn’t subscribe to that theory – and great respect for the people who
did. “Everything is management,” he liked
to say. Often he would buy shares in a company without even looking at the numbers
when he knew and thought highly of the
leadership.
As an intern, admittedly, I had unusual access to the president of the firm – and
I took full advantage of it. Once I asked
how he managed to get companies like
Siemens, Bosch, and Mannesmann to do
deals with a small firm like Arnhold and
S. Bleichroeder. His answer: “I asked them
to give me problems that nobody else
had yet solved – and then I found a way to
10
solve them.” I asked how he managed to
solve them, and he would make a slight
fist and say, “Determination.” Another
time, I asked how George Soros ended up
working at Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder.
To which he responded, “I asked a friend
whom I respected to recommend somebody young and with great promise.” And
then he added a line I have never forgotten: “I have always found that good people
know good people.”
And for my grandfather, it was always
about people. It was never about just
making money. He knew that what made
A&SB different was the unique character of a family firm on Wall Street, and the
extraordinary people who put their whole
lives into it, as he did. The very special and
talented people who have worked at the
firm over the years should know that they
were as much a part of his family as any of
us. He followed their careers and families
as closely as he did his own.
While Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder was
a labor of love for my grandfather, his true
love was the young woman he met when
she was 16 in Berlin at a dinner dance
The Life
in His Years
Andrew Gundlach
at her home on the Wannsee – the same
home that is today the American Academy
in Berlin. The year was 1935. Through
letters and visits, they stayed in close
touch – even as she moved to Paris and
he to London. In 1936, at the age of 22 he
arrived in New York, escorted by his father
who then returned to Germany. Three
years later, in 1939, my grandmother’s family also came to New York.
On March 7, 1940 they were married –
and spent the next 64 years together.
In my grandmother, he found someone who knew his background and culture, his sensitivities and weaknesses, and
in whom he could confide and trust. My
grandmother once told me that at least
once every day of their marriage, he called
her “mein Leben” – which translates as “my
Love,” or “my Life,” or “my Everything.”
Over 64 years, that’s at least 23,000 times.
The bond my grandparents shared was
as strong as I’ve ever seen, showing the
strength of a lifetime commitment of love
and of caring.
Together, they rebuilt their lives and
prospered in America – a culture so very
different from the one they were born
into. My grandfather had grown up in
Berlin, and on weekends went to his family’s country estate in Gross Kamin, formerly in Germany and today ten miles
across the Oder River in Poland. One summer, when I was in Berlin with him just
after the Wall came down, I convinced him
that we should take a car to the place of
his childhood memories. He remembered
it well – especially the park and its winding paths through beautiful forests. It was
a very emotional moment for him, and it
prompted one of his favorite sayings. “It is
amazing what one can experience in one
lifetime, if one lives long enough.”
My grandfather died just short of his
ninetieth birthday. He left us quietly,
caringly and, as always, wanting more
than anything else for his family to stick
together through good times and bad into
the future. Today, his children and grandchildren are trying to carry forward his
legacy into a future that will need both
his reach and his vision. His memory will
live on – not only in our minds but also in
our hearts.
“It is amazing what one can experience
in one lifetime, if one lives long enough.”
Throughout his life, my grandfather was
always devoted to the Katzenellenbogen
family he was born into: his older sister
died in her teenage years, and he made
sure her gravesite in Berlin was well tended – even when he was brand new to
America and didn’t have much money.
Late in 1939, he helped get his parents out
of Germany, first to England and shortly
thereafter to Switzerland. Tragically, the
war years prevented him from reuniting
with his parents before my great grandfather, Max Katzenellenbogen, died in 1944.
Thereafter, he supported his mother,
Leonie, for 37 years, and we all enjoyed visiting her in Switzerland as children.
Beyond grief is our gratitude. We thank
him for giving us an example of discipline and hard work, of vision and style, of
humility and steadfast integrity. We thank
him for setting standards of excellence
for us and for teaching us to be generous.
And of course, we thank him for making
us so proud of him and all he managed to
accomplish in his extraordinary life.
Another favorite saying he borrowed
from Adlai Stevenson: “It’s not the years
in your life that count, it’s the life in
your years.” For my grandfather, there
was both a lot of life and a lot of years.
We will miss our Dodo greatly and love
him always.
Knowledge was
his Hobby Horse
Nina von Maltzahn
S
tephen Kellen’s life has been
described in great detail at the
memorial services in New York and
Berlin. He had a special way with language,
both German and English, that I shall
dearly miss.
It is not only his tone of voice that I
miss, the way he answered the phone –
“Stephen Kellen” – the way he announced
himself whenever he called. It is the way he
would always inquire about how one was
faring. That alone says so much about his
character.
Returning from the recent memorial
service in New York, I found myself missing his usual telephone call. “Seid Ihr gut
geflogen?” he would ask? Then, after a
pause, “Wie ist das Wetter in Berlin?”
He always wanted to be well-informed
and constantly sought to acquire new
knowledge, not just about his family but
about so many other things.
He loved to listen and to ask questions.
Whenever he wanted to contemplate
something someone had said, he would
use the short phrase in English, “I see …”
It meant that he intended to return the
given topic soon, and he usually did. I
admired his ability to listen, especially in
cases when I knew he held a very different
opinion.
I was granted the privilege of learning
from him for only a few short years, but
I have so much to thank him for. He was
there whenever I had a question. In the
course of our conversations he often used
the saying “the devil is in the details” – and
then he would proceed to analyze and discuss the whole matter once more, with the
greatest precision.
He was a great philanthropist. The
range of his interests has always been
remarkable. And he did everything with
his characteristic modesty.
He loved youth and relished having discussions with young people. Not only was
he a good listener, he also knew how to ask
highly pointed questions. We were fond
of saying of him that knowledge was his
hobby horse. And whenever possible, he
would try to help young people.
It was one of his traditions when he
was in Berlin to visit to his old school, the
Französisches Gymnasium, and have a talk
with the graduating class. The last time he
went, in 2002, the discussion lasted almost
three hours. As a result of these exchanges he was able to bring the point of view of
young people into his other debates.
He was grateful for his long life and
always curious about what would come
next. “How much one can experience in a
single lifetime,” he would say, “and how
much I am allowed to experience.”– Was
man doch in einem Menschenleben alles
erleben kann und ich noch erleben darf!
After his attack of pneumonia here in
Berlin two years ago, he realized his life
would continue only with God’s will, and
he often said how grateful he was to the
Lord for this blessing. The time he spent at
Martin Luther Hospital remains unforgettable, not just for me. Even in his frail state
he thoroughly enjoyed chatting with the
nurses in a thick Berlin accent. Very soon
he knew everything about the lives of the
people taking care of him. That was truly
Stephen Kellen.
I think he got better more rapidly
because he so enjoyed being in Berlin.
Berlin was his city in Germany – and
only Berlin.
He would say, “Es gibt geborene Berliner
und Wahl-Berliner. Ich bin beides” – There
are born Berliners and Berliners by choice.
I am both!
In his last years he was very concerned
about the state of the world. “Die Welt ist
aus den Fugen,” he would often say – the
world is out of joint. And he would add:
“We’ve had fifty years of paradise.” I cannot imagine a better or more succinct summary of the current state of the world.
The American Academy meant a great
deal to him, and it gave him great pleasure – because of his feelings for his native
city, and because he saw it as an important bridge between America and Berlin.
Here, too, Stephen and Anna-Maria Kellen
achieved so much through their efforts.
Speaking about my grandmother
Ludmilla Arnhold at the opening of the
Hans Arnhold Center, I said “Behind every
great man stands a great women.” I can say
the same today. Behind the unforgettable
Stephen Kellen stands a great woman: my
aunt Anna-Maria Kellen.
Hans and Ludmilla Arnhold surrounded by their family. From left to right: Marina, Stephen, and Anna-Maria Kellen (née Arnhold), Ludmilla and Hans Arnhold, Ellen Maria Gorrissen (née Arnhold), and Nina Gorrissen (the author).
The Berlin Journal
11
Promises
to Keep
Marina Kellen French
W
hat an extraordinary human
being my father was! And how
surprised he would be to hear
the kind words said about him here.
Everyone knows that fathers and daughters have a special relationship, and I was
lucky to have that with him for so long. I
feel that I can remember my father every
day of my life. The first real memories are
the regular Saturday and Sunday trips we
made to the carousel in New York’s Central
Park. When I was at the Brearley School he
New York. Often he would buy a picture
and take it home under his arm.
I remember one incident well when we
went to the Saidenberg Gallery and he fell
in love with one of the three tomato plants
that Picasso painted. He really wanted it
but could not afford it, so every Saturday
for at least six months we visited the painting, until sadly one day it was gone.
When he made up his mind that he
wanted a picture by a contemporary artist,
he was determined to find one and often
took us to their homes in Europe as well as
in America.
He became a real mentor in my teenage
years and taught me to be economical. He
was particularly firm about always turning the lights off when I left a room, which
I do to this day, frequently with my husband still in the room. He also taught me
to drive, and always said there was nothing
worse than a bad female driver. He worked
especially on my driving backwards.
“I am an old-fashioned man, and I also
have the same wife.”
walked me every day to the corner of 74th
Street and Park Avenue and put me on the
school bus, always telling me to enjoy my
day of school and learn something! He
loved father’s day at the school, and I was
always so proud of him.
No one probably ever knew that Daddy
was once a true Yankees fan. He liked to go
to Yankee Stadium and knew all the names
of the players: Joe DiMaggio, Johnny Mize,
Hank Bauer, Yogi Berra, etc.
In the summer we always traveled to
the mountains of Switzerland where we
spent time with his mother and my maternal grandparents, and when he joined us
on his two weeks vacation, one of his favorite pastimes was to go on walks with me
and pick baskets of berries, which we had
for dinner.
Daddy graduated from the College
Royal Français and the Handelshochschule, and his first job was with the
Berliner Handelsgesellschaft. Daddy came
to New York via London in 1936.
He shared an apartment on East 79th
street with Gian Carlo Menotti and John
Stresemann, whose father had been Germany’s prime minister. He was a workaholic, always striving for perfection and
questioning whether his decisions were
the best ones that could be made.
Daddy felt a great responsibility to build
up Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder to its former eminent state. He often said that what
is needed to succeed is energy, urgency,
discipline, focus, and fear.
His love of art came from his aunt,
Estella Katzenellenbogen, who was a
well-known collector of impressionists in
Berlin. As I grew older he took me nearly
every Saturday to visit art galleries in
12
When I started dating I noticed that my
male friends liked to talk to him as much
as to me. He was very protective of me
because my mother told me that he knew
how men take advantage of single young
ladies.
Daddy did not like a lot of change in his
life. He wore the same watch he received in
1936 from a friend in London and cufflinks
that his parents gave him at an early age.
He was born in a house in Berlin on the
Fasanenstrasse, which is now occupied by
the Kempinski Hotel, and he stayed at that
hotel on every visit for the rest of his life.
On his business trips to Zurich he always
stayed a the Baur au Lac and always had the
same meal for lunch and dinner. The waiters did not give him a menu because they
knew it was the blue trout and boiled potatoes. In Düsseldorf it was the shrimp in
dill sauce, and in Munich it was the venison. When he was asked why he had the
same routine everywhere he replied “I am
an old-fashioned man, and I also have the
same wife.”
I always made fun of my father for never
enjoying good restaurants. He felt that my
mother was the best cook around and that
nowhere could he eat as well as at home.
His greatest joy was spending time in the
house in southern France, which he called
“Paradise on earth.” He loved going to the
markets to buy food and talking to the vendors and hearing the latest news about
their personal lives.
In fact, he liked to conduct his own
polls everywhere to find out what people
were thinking, and to gauge the political
environment. He was particularly fond of
doing this in the waiting rooms of the
Mayo Clinic.
Once, on being introduced to Dolly
Parton, he asked, “And what do you do?”
Daddy loved people, young and old,
and loved life. Partly that was because
my mother was the sunshine to him and
taught him to enjoy life to the fullest and
not to be a pessimist.
He loved his adopted new country and
was grateful for the opportunity it gave
People trusted him and many came to
him to solve their problems. He deeply cared
about them and wanted to help.
He had something very special about
him – a twinkle in his eye, low key and brilliant, decent, honest, a vision of the world,
knowledge of history, and integrity and wisdom, and for me he was the quintessential
European gentleman.
The woods are lovely dark and deep/But
I have promises to keep, /And miles to
go before I sleep,/And miles to go before
I sleep.
– Robert Frost
him. He always said: “I am a good Berliner
but also a good New Yorker.”
It is especially poignant that the villa
that currently houses the Hans Arnhold
Center is the house in which Daddy first
met my mother. When he was courting her,
as he tells the story, he would take the SBahn to Wannsee and call from the station
before walking the short distance down the
Sandwerder. This was to give them time to
lock up the German shepherds, who were
well known in the neighborhood for their
love of pantlegs.
You have heard a lot about his great philanthropy. He often quoted to me the words
of St. Francis of Assisi: “It is in giving that
we receive.”
He loved his family, and when the grandchildren came along he loved nothing more
than sitting on the floor playing games with
them. When they got older he took them too
to the museums and galleries.
He was the rock of Gibraltar for us all and
nothing was a problem. There would always
be a solution.
After his death we learned that on that
date he had been awarded the French Legion
d’honneur. How sad that he never knew of it.
Daddy, I hope that all of your descendants can live up to your standards, which
were so high, and that with the tools you
gave us we can exemplify your honesty and
intelligence , and that you will look down
on us and be proud.
Ice, dirt, and grey miraculous flesh. I can put my finger on the space debris
buried all night on my window, until fog effaces it and other signs.
What am I looking for? Why does comet dust that seems to burn recall
the cold basilica, in June, my pious friend and I invited to the altar,
the priest (sour voice, sour heart) reciting: locked in the reliquary, livid,
translucent, like a flake of trapped ash, floats a slice of Christ’s heart,
it’s all true, there’s medical testimony, it looks like a dragonfly’s wing
but is His living blood cells. How curtly he announced it, impatient
with non-belief before it shows itself, impatient with my indifference,
while my friend wheezed through his mouth, awed, worshipful,
and the father looked from him to me, as if to say you can’t appreciate
without astonishment, the miraculous wants innocence beyond knowledge
of contradiction, not the monocle of my unbelief. Yet now each night
the comet somehow cuts across the relic, a coincidence easy to credit
because it makes no sense, to believe in what I know is not true life.
The stars and gods have made us so that we make meaning of what
resists us, and of such resistance make a consciousness, a rotund
coherence of accident and law. The imagination in one stroke
squeegees subway passages, manhole-cover steam cones, clouds,
blowback snow when bus wheels turn, the dance of minor things
sifting from or into others, momentously. I smudge an afterimage
on my window to mark a juicy slice of being. What happens now?
Busses and cafes explode in holy lands, in Hackensack
a father kisses his son in peace, money eats dirt on Wall Street,
Big Casino overdoses across the street, the Gypsy to the Werewolf sings
Even a man who is pure at heart and says his prayers by night
Will become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms, and the moon is full and bright.
Glacial dust wasting away across the sky where gods have come and gone,
downstairs a student’s cello practices praise and questions for those gods.
Woeful, nervous, almost content, he falters and plays the phrase again.
W. S. Di Piero was a fellow at the American Academy in the fall of 2002.
This poem and the poem on page 49 are forthcoming in Brother Fire, which Knopf
will publish next fall.
A Cold June
W. S. Di Piero
© Getty Images
The Prospects of
Partnership
Developing Strategies for
the Middle East
Dennis Ross
Edward P. Djerejian
Martin Indyk
The texts printed here are based on public lectures delivered at the Hans Arnhold Center in March and April of 2004.
W
hen dennis ross left his two-hour discussion with German
National Security Advisor Bernd Mützelburg, we were no longer surprised by the length or intensity of the meeting. It was the
last talk in a marathon of private diplomacy we had arranged for three highlevel American Middle East experts – Martin Indyk, Edward Djerejian, and
Dennis Ross – on the initiative of Academy Chairman Richard Holbrooke
and with the support of the German Marshall Fund. The Foreign Policy
Forum’s 54 public and private presentations, conversations, roundtables,
and interviews underscored just how keen the desire for renewed bilateral
discussion was on both sides. Each of our Distinguished Visitors stayed in
Berlin for a week, engaging in in-depth exchanges with politicians, members of the media, and the public. Our motives were simple: the Middle
East, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular, are issues of tremendous and shared concern. An intensification of US-German dialogue and
closer working relations between our two countries are needed. Germany’s
relationship with key countries in the Arab world – and the high regard
Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer enjoys among both Palestinians and
Israelis – has made Berlin a fertile ground for this initiative.
The Academy could not have found three more seasoned former American
diplomats to launch its Foreign Policy Forum. Dennis Ross’s vast experience on the ground in the Middle East is exemplified by his innumerable
conversations with Yasser Arafat conducted over the course of more than
ten years. Edward Djerejian served eight US presidents and was asked by
the current administration to chair a congressional commission on public diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim world. Martin Indyk served twice as
US Ambassador to Israel under Clinton and founded two important nonpartisan Middle East think tanks: the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy (now headed by Dennis Ross) and the Brookings Institution’s Saban
Center for the Middle East Policy, which he continues to direct.
Each of our guests was struck by the seriousness of the German commitment to playing a beneficial and creative role in the region. The desire for
dialogue was evident in every encounter, from high-level meetings at the
Chancellery and Foreign Ministry to roundtables organized at institutes as
varied as the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, the American Jewish Committee,
the Aspen Institute Berlin, the German Marshall Fund, and the Stiftung
Wissenschaft and Politik.
In the course of these meetings, ideas were aired on matters such as the
recent emphasis on the “Greater Middle East.” While differences in the
American and European perception of realities were apparent, particularly with respect to Israel’s recently announced plan to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, all agreed that the withdrawal presents opportunities – to say nothing of enormous challenges
– that could best be seized with prompt and heightened US-German consultation. Within this context, our visitors asked many pointed questions of their European interlocutors. How can European countries best
leverage their influence with Arab regimes and, in particular, induce the
Palestinian Authority to take responsibility for security in Gaza? When
should European countries be prepared to make public their private criticisms of Palestinians, not least in order to strengthen reformists within
the Palestinian Authority? And to what extent does courting Arafat merely reflect the same wishful thinking that was proven wrong at Camp David
in 2000?
After three years of relatively limited dialogue, the private visits of
Ambassadors Indyk, Djerejian, and Ross to Berlin hint at how much could
be achieved if diplomats in both countries make use of their vast and often
complementary expertise on the Middle East.
– Gary Smith
14
© Getty Images
The Berlin Journal
15
Is Peace Still Possible
in the Middle East
Planning for the Day After
By Dennis Ross
Many believe that the Bush administration went
into Iraq without planning for what would come
the day after. In fact, the administration did plan,
but it based its planning on a series of assumptions:
that the oil fields had to be protected; that there
would be a major flow of refugees fleeing to the
North; that there would be mass starvation; that
the country risked fragmentation; and, finally, that
there would be mass retribution killings. All of those
assumptions were reasonable. But as it turned out,
they were wrong. The US administration failed to
make security its prime concern. Saddam’s regime
was one of the two remaining Stalinist, totalitarian
regimes left in the world. Who would fill that
vacuum when it fell? We did not plan for it; we did
not bring in enough forces; we did not bring in
enough police.
There were of course several different sources
for the insurgency. Probably well over half a million
people had been dependent on Saddam Hussein
and his totalitarian structure. Those who were part
of the regime feared being dispossessed. The Sunni
minority, in particular, was bound to feel at risk.
In his last years, moreover, Saddam had set different Sunni tribes against each other, and those on the
losing end of his manipulations had turned increasingly to Sunni Islamic extremism (traditionally foreign to Iraq). Finally, the Bush administration significantly underestimated the likelihood of the US
becoming a symbol of occupation and, in turn, contributing to the insurgency.
The Iraqi military, while it could never have
been an agent for social reconstruction, might in the
transition period have helped to provide security.
Before the war, the US dropped millions of leaflets
on Iraq advising the Iraqi military to stay in their
barracks and promising that they would be fine if
they did. Instead, the military was disbanded after
the war. By disbanding the Iraqi military, and by not
having sufficient troops on the ground, there was little to fill the vacuum other than chaos. This fuelled
the insurgency.
The insurgency in Iraq has deeper roots, unfortunately, than the administration initially imagined, though it is important to make clear that the
initial insurgency had little to do with jihadists (and
even now their overall numbers in Iraq should not
be exaggerated). As long as the insurgency remains
concentrated among the Sunnis it will eventually be
manageable. However, should the Shia join it on a
large scale, it will be very difficult to succeed in Iraq.
I do not believe that the administration
went into Iraq because of the War on Terror. But,
16
paradoxically, the administration cannot afford to
lose in Iraq because of the War on Terror. While the
jihadists may not have been mainly responsible for
the insurgency, they will take great heart from, and
exploit the consequences of, the US being driven
from Iraq. It is thus critical to succeed there.
It was always naive to suggest that a successful outcome of the war in Iraq would be a row of new
dominos – “dominos of democracy.” All the same,
success in Iraq would embolden reformers elsewhere, help them find their voices, and give them
confidence. Moreover, regimes that repress reformers would see the price of repression going up. That
can still happen, and it is another reason why we
have a stake in Iraq’s stabilization.
The administration did not
go into Iraq because of the
War on Terror. But because
of the War on Terror it cannot afford to lose in Iraq.
The Bush administration’s Greater Middle East
initiative is something that makes an enormous
amount of sense, but even without it, we should be
pushing the idea of reform on its own merits.
I have worked for administrations that were
guilty, basically, of making a Faustian bargain with
our friends in the Middle East. As long as they were
supportive of our needs – oil, in the Saudi case – we
didn’t pay close attention to what they did internally. As we found out on September 11, that did not
come cost free.
There is a widespread image that the US exercises a double standard in the Middle East. No doubt,
part of that stems from our support for Israel. But
there is also the perception that we use democracy
as a weapon against those we don’t like – and never
against the ones we do like. The fact is, in many of
the regimes we are friendly to, citizens have no input
in economic or political decision making. There is
the sense in far too many Arab countries that nothing can change. Radical Islam preys on that hopelessness and frustration.
Our promotion of the reform process must be
done intelligently. A movement needs internal roots
for it to have authenticity. One such positive development came in mid March in Alexandria, Egypt,
during a meeting of civic organizations and mem-
bers of civil society at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
The result was a home-grown call for reform. The
participants called for an “elected legislative body,
an independent judiciary, and a government that is
subject to popular and constitutional oversight.” It
called for freedom of the press and the support of
human rights, especially of women, children, and
minorities. Germany, working with France, has
taken the lead in being prepared to embrace something like the Alexandria statement. This fits nicely
with what the Bush administration has in mind, and
supporting the Alexandria statement would be a
very positive step for the G-8 to take this June.
Clearly, different countries will move at different paces. But we must at least be consistent in supporting broader values. And if certain friendly governments or regimes are inclined to repress their
reformers, they should know that they pay a price –
and not only in private.
If the situation in Iraq continues to be unstable, the broader pressure for reform is going to dissipate. We all have an enormous stake in the positive
outcome of Iraq, and it is going to have to take time.
The right kind of stability and change can be, in
part, produced by a positive perception that change
is possible.
There is a hearty group of reformers in the
Middle East, and their voices are gaining strength.
They need support from the outside and the sense
that they will not be abandoned. Their hope is the
greatest antidote to those who prey upon an absence
of hope.
N
o issue evokes more anger or a deeper sense
of injustice throughout the Middle East than
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And no issue
serves as a better excuse to divert attention away
from what is needed. Resolving the Palestinian conflict would take away a major source of anger and
grievance – and an important recruiting tool. But
it is no panacea. It is one step among many. This
notion of broader reform, of creating a sense of participation, of dealing with the roots of hopelessness
and alienation is crucial.
The Israeli-Palestinian issue is neither a function nor a derivative of Iraq. At the same time, had
we been more successful – not just in bringing about
the demise of Saddam’s regime but in terms of stabilizing the system more quickly – it would have greatly affected the psychology of the region. It would
have fostered a deeper sense that change is possible,
even between the Israelis and Palestinians.
History and geography have destined Israelis
and Palestinians to be neighbors. Israel, with all of
its power, cannot extinguish Palestinian aspirations.
And the Palestinians, with all their anger and with
all the use of terror, cannot abolish Israel. But for the
past three years, there has been no genuine peace
process. There has been only a deepening war process, and with all the pain and suffering, it has produced a legacy of disbelief on each side. Neither the
Israelis nor the Palestinians believe they have a partner for peace. The absence of any dialogue other
than a dialogue of violence has cemented the mutual
conviction that peace is not possible.
The “road map to peace” plan has been a serious, if flawed, effort to revive the peace process. On
June 24, 2002 President Bush gave a speech declaring that a two-state approach would henceforth be
American policy. But he also – rightly – made it clear
that no Palestinian state could be built on the twin
foundations of corruption and terror. In effect, his
central message was that the Palestinians are not
entitled to a state – they must earn it.
The road map’s concept was logical enough: three
phases and a set of reciprocal obligations.
In the initial phase, the Israelis lift the siege and the
Palestinians reform themselves and fulfill security
obligations. The second phase sets up a Palestinian
state with provisional borders. And in the third phase,
that state negotiates the issues of permanent status.
Its only flaw is that the members of the Quartet
– the US, the EU, the Russians and the UN – negotiated a document in which they, understandably,
have no responsibility for carrying out even one of
the 52 paragraphs of obligations. The Israelis and
Palestinians have those obligations, but the document was not negotiated with them. Not surprisingly, the Israelis and the Palestinians interpret each
of the 52 paragraphs and their respective obligations differently. The road map will never have even
the possibility of a life until Israelis and Palestinians
have a common understanding of those obligations.
The fact is, however, that no such understanding exists, and there has been no diplomacy to produce it, or a least a Quartet understanding of what
would constitute performance. This has ensured
that the road map would exist only on paper, while
the reality on the ground would remain frozen.
The most recent effort to create a new opening has come not from the Quartet but from Ariel
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1
Sharon. Sharon,
prime minister
of Israel
of the settler movement – has announced the intention to withdraw from Gaza and to evacuate both
settlements there and at least a symbolic number
of settlements in the West Bank. Sharon says Israel
will not only withdraw from the territory but will
also evacuate settlements unilaterally – without any
reciprocation from the Palestinians.
Unilateral evacuation of settlements has no precedent. Frankly, not even the Labor party had ever spoken of ending the occupation in the terms that Sharon
now has used. What he is doing is revolutionary.
Resolving the IsraeliPalestinian conflict would
take away a major source
of anger and grievance in
the Arab world, but it is
no panacea.
Even the Palestinians I talked to in late March in
Jerusalem and Ramallah were calling it a revolutionary development. They realize that this is creating a
moment and that much depends on how they take
advantage of it. Here is a chance to prove that they
are capable of good government, of being a state, of
taking control in Gaza and fulfilling responsibilities.
One of the things that struck me in recent talks
with Palestinians and Israelis was a convergence of
concern about the “day after.” Like all “day-after”
scenarios, you cannot afford to wait until the day
after. By then you’ve waited to long. The opening
being created by the Sharon initiative must be used
to empower the Palestinians who believe in coexistence, not those who reject it. The situation among
Palestinians, however, is – to put it diplomatically –
highly competitive.
The good news is that Israeli withdrawal allows
for a revolutionary moment, a chance to break out
of a completely frozen situation. The bad news is
that the nay-sayers are standing ready to fill the vacuum. If the Israelis simply leave Gaza and throw
the keys behind them over a high fence, there is too
high a probability that the group that catches the
keys won’t believe in a peaceful coexistence between
Palestinians and Israelis. The one group that has
planned most effectively for the day after has been
Hamas – even before the assassination of Sheik
Yassin. Hamas is planning to dominate this process,
planning to shape governance after the Israelis are
out, already planning how it will turn over the settlements. If that is the direction in which we are headed, this potentially transformative revolutionary
development will turn out decidedly for the worse.
There is a worrisome gap in time between the
Israeli declaration of the intent to withdraw and
the actual withdrawal – I estimate it will be about a
year. If we don’t create a positive momentum, many
terrible things could happen in that period, which
might, once again, erode the chances of transforming the situation. And it will make it harder to produce the tacit cooperation that is necessary to coordinate parallel moves unilaterally.
u
Meret Oppenheim. Objekt (Frühstück im Pelz) Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure). 1936. Mit Fell überzogene Tasse, Untertasse und Löffel. Tasse 10,9 cm im Durchmesser, Untertasse 23,7 cm im Durchmesser, Löffel 20,2 cm lang, Gesamthöhe 7,3 cm. Ankauf. © VG-Bild Kunst, Bonn 2004
200 Meisterwerke aus dem Museum of Modern Art, New York
20. Februar – 19. September 2004. Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin
200 Masterpieces from The Museum of Modern Art, New York
20 February – 19 September, 2004. Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin
www.das-moma-in-berlin.de
How, then, can we affect the outcome? How
can we ensure that the Palestinians assume real
responsibility? Palestinians in the Fatah party know
how high the stakes are – that this is a competition
over the future. Will it be an Islamist future or a secular one? We, too, have a stake in having that future
belong to Fatah.
But Arafat is a complicating factor. He has no
interest in a stable outcome here – not because he
wants Hamas to gain, but because chaos serves his
interests. In the face of such chaos, Arafat believes
international actors will turn back to him to bring
order. This may not fit reality – but it is his perception of reality. Arafat’s fundamental weakness is
that he will never foreclose an option and never
close a door. To end the conflict, for him, means
ending himself. Arafat has been governed by a
cause and a struggle for that cause.
While Arafat believes that he, personally, gains
by chaos and instability, the new guard of Fatah
understands that they lose. Our critical task at this
juncture is to create an international consensus
that can build an incentive for Palestinians to act
responsibly. By creating a public rather than merely private consensus, by announcing that the whole
world is watching, the Palestinians will feel obliged
to demonstrate that they are up to the task of statehood. We need to let them know what kinds of
responsibilities have to be assumed. And we need
to offer our help.
That gives them no explanation to use with
the Palestinian public for taking steps on security – such as acting against groups like Hamas that
continue to promote terror. We should strengthen Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Ala’s hand by
being public and precise about Palestinian responsibilities. We should talk to Abu Ala and members
of the legislative council – an institutional base that
is home to reformers among Palestinians. In every
possible way, we must strengthen those who are
prepared to coexist with Israel.
We must also help the Palestinian Authority fill
in and provide the social services currently being
provided most effectively by Hamas. One tends to
forget that Hamas, though a terrorist organization,
provides a great many social services – hospitals,
clinics, after-school programs. The outside world –
and this is especially true in Europe – must find better ways of cutting off the flow of monies to Hamas
without dismantling that social safety net.
Creating a way-station for peace need not be a
long, drawn-out process, but we are not at a point
where we can suddenly make peace. All the groundwork has to be laid again. What I call “two freedoms” must be established. The Israelis have to feel
freedom from terror, and the Palestinians have to
feel freedom from Israeli control.
When the Israelis withdraw from Gaza – and
make a symbolic step toward withdrawing from the
West Bank – it will be crucial for Israelis in the West
Bank to get out of Palestinian lives. Israelis are currently controlling nearly every aspect of Palestinian
life in the West Bank.
But in the face of Palestinians assuming no
security responsibilities and essentially doing nothing to stop terror, Israel has to protect itself. It has
two choices: a siege or a barrier. The siege has prevailed since the second intifada began – 160 checkpoints in the West Bank.
18
Under the siege, however, it is simply impossible for Palestinians to lead anything resembling
a normal life. (If you have to get to a hospital, you’d
better hope it is not an emergency. You have to
plan a couple of extra hours in the morning and the
afternoon just to get your kids to school. And forget
about even trying to conduct normal commerce.)
Palestinians regard the siege as a kind of collective
punishment.
And yet it prevents 90-95 percent of the terror attacks against Israel today. The problem is
that, a year from now, the siege will have to stop just
as many, if not more, such attacks. The siege fosters continuing Palestinian anger and resentment
against Israel. Hamas operatives may be killed,
but so long as the siege exists, there will be an everdeepening pool of new recruits. In short, the siege
is not in Israel’s interest. It makes sense on a dayto-day basis, but as a longer-term strategy it preserves Palestinian hostility and an Israeli presence
in the territories that threatens Israel’s Jewish character. (By 2010, there may be more Arabs than Jews
between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. If
Israel remains as it is in the territories, it cannot be
both Jewish and democratic.)
The whole world is watching to see if Palestinians
are up to the task of
statehood.
Is the barrier an alternative? The fence is a
more benign way of producing security for the
Israelis than a siege because it does not interfere
with and control all aspects of Palestinian life.
The fence being built right now is going to be on
12 percent of the West Bank. About 5 percent of it
is a wall; 95 percent is a fence. It has to be built in
a way that reflects topographical, demographic,
humanitarian and political criteria. Partly you
want to ensure that you have two states; partly you
want to get out of Palestinian lives so that they feel
freedom from Israeli control; and partly you want
to send a message that the fence isn’t permanent
– unless Palestinians choose to make it permanent.
Once a way-station has been built – once both
sides have a kind of normality back in their lives
again, it will be possible to think about peacemaking and the future. The hardest thing today is for
both sides to accept the fact that the other has a
complaint or a grievance – that the other side is suffering. Each side is consumed by its own sense of
grievance – with some legitimacy. We have to break
the cycle of grievance, break the cycle of anger, and
break the cycle of revenge.
Given the stakes, given what can be lost,
this is a time to develop a much more collective
approach. Germany and the EU have what can
only be described as a special relationship with
the Palestinians. If Europe has cultivated a special relationship, this is the moment to trade on
it. The regional and international friends of the
Palestinians should publicly say to them “we’re
going to help you, but here’s what’s required of
you.” If the Palestinians need help on security, we
should be prepared to provide that help. But they
must take the lead. No one else can act for them. As
long as the Palestinian mindset is that someone will
do it for them, nothing will change.
Abu Mazen said in a speech about 18 months
ago – before his brief tenure as Palestinian prime
minister – that it was time for a Palestinian sense
of national responsibility to become more important than unity. Unity had been an excuse for the
Palestinians to avoid confronting violence. If the
Europeans would say publicly that those who pursue violence now, in this setting, are jeopardizing
not only Palestinian interest but threatening the
Palestinian cause, it could do much to change the
internal dynamic among Palestinians. The very
notion that there are legitimate and illegitimate
ways to pursue Palestinian aspirations needs to
become part of the public discussion.
This would also change the character of their
relationship with the Israelis. Joschka Fischer has
had more of an impact than anyone else in Europe
on the Israelis. He has demonstrated to the Israelis
that he takes their concerns seriously, and as a
result, they listen to him.
I haven’t always put such emphasis on the “collective we.” But the involvement of the other members of the Quartet is especially important at a time
when American diplomacy has been less intense.
The US didn’t produce the Sharon initiative. Israeli
pressure has done so. Israelis support it because of
their concerns about demographics and their concerns over three years of war with no prospects of
security.
If we do not plan now and focus on practical
steps on the ground soon, we won’t get there. The
promise of the current moment is that it provides a
chance to create a way-station to peace. The danger
in the moment is that we may let it slip by. We cannot wait until the day after.
Is there a reason to be hopeful? The situation
does not lend itself to optimism, but we cannot give
up. Giving up will make hopelessness a self-fulfilling prophecy. And giving in means giving up to the
wrong people – those who reject the idea of a peaceful settlement. I start from a different premise: that
there is no alternative to peaceful coexistence. o
Ambassador Dennis Ross is director of the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy. He served as special Middle
East coordinator under President Clinton and directed the
State Department’s Policy Planning Office in the administration of George H. W. Bush. His book The Missing Peace:
The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace will be published this August by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
© Getty Images
The Berlin Journal
19
A Struggle of Ideas
US Public Diplomacy in the Middle East
By Edward P. Djerejian
Last year I had the honor of chairing a congressionally mandated public diplomacy commission to address one of the most important issues
facing us since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Our 13member United States Advisory Group on Public
Diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim World was a
bipartisan commission of regional and communication experts. Our report, “Changing Minds,
Winning Peace” (online at www.bakerinstitute.org)
was released on October 1, 2003.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, required
the United States to pursue a long-term, comprehensive war on terrorism. Extending military
power abroad, practicing vigorous state-to-state
diplomacy, choking off financial resources to our
adversaries, and improving defense at home – these
steps are all necessary. But they are not all that is
required. Despite our best efforts in these areas,
animosity toward the US has grown to unprecedented levels, making the achievement of our
policy goals more difficult and expensive, both in
dollars and in lives.
In the National Security Strategy of the US in
the fall of 2002, President George W. Bush spoke
of the importance of adapting public diplomacy to
meet the post-September-11 challenge: “The war
on terrorism is not a clash of civilizations. It does,
however, reveal the clash inside a civilization, a
battle for the future of the Muslim world. This is a
struggle of ideas, and this is an area where America
must excel.”
But America has not excelled in the struggle of
ideas in the Arab and Muslim world. According to
the director of the Pew Research Center, attitudes
toward the US “have gone from bad to worse.”
According to Pew surveys, “the bottom has fallen out of Arab and Muslim support for the United
States.” For example, shortly before the war against
Saddam Hussein, by greater than a two-to-one margin, Muslims surveyed in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and
Jordan said the US was a more serious threat than
Iraq. Only 2 percent of British Muslims agreed
with the statement that “the US supports democracy around the world.” The Arab and Muslim
world, however, cannot be addressed in isolation.
Animosity toward the US is part of a broader crisis
worldwide.
What is required is not merely tactical adaptation but strategic, and radical, transformation.
Often, we are simply not present to explain
the context and content of national policies and
values. As someone in Morocco told us, “if you do
not define yourself in this part of the world, the
20
extremists will define you.” They have defined us,
for example, as ruthless occupiers in Iraq and as
bigots, intolerant to Muslims in our own country.
These depictions are absolutely wrong, but they
stick because it is rare that governments or individuals in the region are prepared to take up our side
of the story and because the US has deprived itself
of the means to respond effectively – or even to be a
significant part of the conversation.
***
As Woody Allen says, “90 percent of life is just
showing up.” In terms of the Arab and Muslim
worlds, we have not been showing up.
As the group was on the way to Cairo last year,
I caught a cold and had to stay in the hotel for an
evening. I turned on al-Arabiyya satellite television and started to watch a talk show entitled “the
Americanization of Islam.” The guests were discussing what they perceived as an American “conspiracy” to hijack their religion. Not a single participant on that two-hour program had a clue
about America. The true American position was
nowhere represented. No one was there to say ‘the
Americans are a religious people. The country has
Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and
other religious groups. There is freedom of religion. There is separation of church and state, but
this in no way means that Americans are not a religious people.” Nothing was said to this effect.
Instead, the discussion simply fed into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Of course, Americans can’t be on every television program and every radio station. We can’t be
in every article that runs in the Arab press. But the
fact is, we are simply not significantly present in
the daily debate and discussion that is taking place
about us. The State Department has only 54 Arabic
speakers with a truly professional level of fluency.
Of these, only a handful are able and willing to participate in media discussion on Arab television and
radio. Our advisory group called for adding three
hundred fluent Arabic speakers within the next two
years. There should be an additional three hundred
by 2008.
Just as the US urgently needs to transform the
way it explains and advocates our values and policies abroad, it also needs to transform the way it listens to what others are saying, not only in Arab and
Muslim states but throughout the world.
Our report made a number of very specific recommendations, including reorganizing the way public diplomacy is managed and funded in the White
House, the National Security Council, and the
State department.
The transformation we advocate can have a
profound effect on Arab and Muslim societies as
well. These societies are at a crossroads, with the
opportunity to take the path toward greater liberty
and prosperity, within the context of their own rich
cultures. With effective policies and public diplomacy, we can help galvanize indigenous moderates
and reformers within these societies. The overall
task is to expand the zone of tolerance and moderation in the Muslim world and to marginalize the
extremists, be the extremists secular or religious.
We must, moreover, be candid in our dialogue.
***
Americans are trapped in a dangerously reinforcing cycle of animosity with Arabs and Muslims. The
latter respond in anger to what they perceive as US
denigration of their societies and cultures, which
in turn prompts an American reaction of bewilderment and resentment, and so on. A transformed
public diplomacy that is candid about differences
but also stresses similarities – especially in values –
can help end this.
Most changes will not occur overnight, but some
steps, taken immediately, will produce short-term
solutions. More importantly, however, the US government needs to view public diplomacy – just as it
views state-to-state diplomacy and national security
– in a long-term perspective. It must be sustained for
decades, not stopped and started as moods change
in the world. Public opinion in the Arab and Muslim
world cannot be cavalierly dismissed.
***
Much has recently been said about the Greater
Middle East, but this policy is not really new. The
first Bush administration raised these issues of
political and economic reforms in the region. At
the same time, losing our common Soviet enemy
precipitated a kind of identity crisis. Various theories and schools of thought began to emerge
around the idea of defining the new enemy, including Samuel P. Huntington’s notion of “the clash of
civilizations.” His thesis is, to me, a classic example of what I learned from my Jesuit education at
Georgetown University to identify as the “fallacy of composition,” the extrapolation from parts
to a whole. Reality is very wide, but if you generalize outward from one small part of it, you’ll reach
a false understanding of the truth. Huntington
looked at various cultures and civilizations and
homed in on the extremist fringe. From it, he generalized his theory of the clash of cultures and civilizations. This notion, however faulty, has received a
great deal of attention.
America’s position as the world’s superpower
may well contribute to the animosity shown toward
it today, but it alone is not a satisfying explanation.
The US enjoyed the same level of relative power after
World War II, for example, but was widely admired
throughout the world. Attitudes toward the US were
important in the past, but the stakes were raised on
September 11, 2001. They have become a central
national security concern. Hostility toward the US
makes achieving our policy goals far more difficult. u
Television in the Arab and Muslim world is, by
far, the most efficient means of disseminating ideas.
And accurate portrayals of US policies on Arab TV
and Muslim TV in general are sadly lacking. Part
of our group went to Casablanca in Morocco. One
group member, Judith Milestone, described the
bidonvilles of Casablanca, where, amid excruciating
poverty and abysmal sanitary conditions, one could
see hundreds of hand-wired satellite TV dishes.
The residents of the Moroccan slums are watching
the satellite networks of al-Jazeera and al-Arabiyya,
with their political slant on the news. They’re watching film programs that show people with cars and
beautiful apartments. Throughout the Middle East
they’re watching pre-canned American sitcoms. In
fact, they are being bombarded with American television content, much of which distorts the perceptions of viewers who lack the contextual background
to understand, for example, that the lifestyles in
programs like “Friends,” “Dallas,” and “Seinfeld”
are not necessarily the American norm. In
Damascus, “Seinfeld” is aired twice a day. A Syrian
teacher of English asked us for help in explaining
American family life to her students. She asked,
“Does ‘Friends’ show a typical American family?”
In most of the Arab world, the 8 o’clock news
typically consists of footage of the country’s president, prime minister, and the foreign minister meeting guests – for half and hour, with music in the
background and virtually no commentary. That’s
the news. And after thirty minutes, there is the thinnest commentary. It is an insult to the intelligence
of the Arab people. And that is what they have been
subjected to for decades.
All of a sudden something interesting happened called al-Jazeera. The satellite network broke
through all sorts of barriers. Some people in our
group called it “electronic perestroika.” The network
carries live shots of what is happening in crisis situations. Now, all of a sudden an Arab family can
watch, from its living room, an Israeli official being
interviewed by an al-Jazeera correspondent. It was
an amazing change. I have been interviewed by the
network and I therefore know al-Jazeera’s political prejudices first-hand. I have been in their editorial room. But the fact is that the network has done
something revolutionary in the Arab World. It has
brought live news and commentary into the living
room. And that is what we have to compete with.
Our report took a nuanced stand on how to
go about this. In particular, we criticized a project being put forward by the Broadcasting Board
of Governors, the US entity responsible for government-supported international broadcasting, to
establish a Middle East Television Network (now
called “al-Hurra”), designed to compete with alJazeera, al-Arabiyya, and others. In our discussions
in the Muslim countries, we encountered a very high
level of skepticism of state-run TV and radio channels in the Arab world. This was a key perception
in all the countries we went to in our talks with television people, normal citizens, members of NGOs,
and officials. It is understandable that viewers are
turned off by any state-run news outlets and, moreover, do not trust them.
If the US government was going to establish the
first ever foreign satellite TV capability in Arabic, we
concluded, there would be an extremely high credibility barrier to overcome. On one hand, it would
be a very important step toward “showing up” in
the Middle East. But one has to keep in mind that
people simply do not trust state-run TV and radio.
The alternative we proposed was to create a foundation – or a corporation for public diplomacy, like
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the US,
which produces exceptional shows like the “News
Hour with Jim Lehrer” – that would give out grants
to local programmers to purchase quality American
television programs such as the Discovery Channel,
the History Channel, various PBS programs etc. This
mixed private, NGO, public-sector entity would
encourage the airing to an Arab audience of objective and high quality programs that show Americans
debating issues, criticizing one another (even their
own president). Genuine discussion and debate –
programs that show the freedom of the press and
that show Americans exercising their freedom of
expression – struck us as desirable alternatives to
government pronouncements and talking points.
This seemed a good way to bring quality content to 120 Arab TV channels and to six Arab satellite channels. Of course, they would not want to show
everything, but our reasoning was that they would
accept a good part of it – if it were free or affordable.
***
The Advisory Group’s report described a dichotomy throughout the whole Muslim world. American
values have a high approval rating, for Arabs
and Muslims consider them to be their values as
well. (As an Iranian woman told us, “who could
be against life liberty and the pursuit of happiness?”) The ideals of equality of opportunity, equality before the law, of human rights, social justice,
human dignity, and individual freedom are shared
by many.
The value system is not the issue. We found
that the negative attitudes toward the US are largely
based on perceptions about the execution of US policies in certain areas. They may be based on perceptions rather than reality, but these perceptions are
powerful forces.
The al-Jazeera satellite network, for all its political
prejudices, has done something revolutionary; it has
brought live news into Arab
living rooms.
The three major prisms through which America
is judged in the Arab and the Muslim world are:
the Arab-Israeli conflict; Iraq, where the US is perceived not as a liberator but as occupier; and fundamental issues of political and economic governance
in the Muslim countries themselves. But what does
this third point have to do with America? We have
to be honest about the fact that there is systemic
corruption in many of these regimes and societies.
This is often combined with major economic problems – underemployment, a general lack of privatization and property rights – as well as growing
demographic pressures. Levels of real political participation in the region are low. So when citizens of
such a country grieve about their lot, they also take
account of the fact that the US is one of the major
supporters of the regime in power.
Separating simple opposition to policies from
generalized anti-American attitudes is not easy.
The Advisory Group’s mandate was not to advise on
foreign policy itself, but rather to examine how the
tools of public diplomacy may be used to promote
US values, policies, and interests. One can say that
US policy constitutes about 80 percent of how attitudes and thoughts are formed in this region; public
diplomacy counts for only about 20 percent. But it
is a critical 20 percent, when one considers the
stakes involved.
It would, of course, be absurd to advocate
changing policies in order to become popular. We
have to pursue our policies as any administration
perceives the national interest of the US. And we
must use the tools of public diplomacy to assess the
likely effects of our particular policies.
Most importantly, we must be ever aware of the
perceived gap between our principles and our policies; many people in the Muslim world say that we
don’t live up to our values.
American policy toward the Arab and Muslim
world on particular issues needs to be more fully
communicated. These include: the peaceful settlement of conflicts between the Arabs and Israelis,
in Kashmir, and in the Western Sahara; peace and
reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq; regional security cooperation; and our encouragement of
progressive economic, social, and political reforms.
As a former American diplomat, I can say
that there’s nothing to be apologetic about in the
major thrust of our policy toward this region. The
American vision for the Arab and the Muslim world
is a positive one: for it to become a peaceful, prosperous region working toward participatory government. Our goal is not to impose a Jeffersonian or a
Federalist model from above, but to allow democracy to evolve according to the cultures and the
structures of these societies themselves.
Of course, we will have differences with Arabs
on how, for example, we conduct our role in the
Arab-Israeli conflict. But reasoned opposition to
US policies need not turn into hatred and extremism. And if you look at the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is
only when the US – with our European allies, especially in the current context of the Quartet – acts
with strong leadership and political will, making use
of a strategy and its influence, that progress can be
made. It takes a US President, whether Democrat or
a Republican, to move forward with commitment
and strategy – from Nixon and Kissinger in the disengagement agreement in 1973; to Jimmy Carter in
1979 and the Camp David Accords; from Bush 41
and James A. Baker III in the Madrid Conference; to
Clinton and Camp David; to Bush 43 and the Road
Map and two-state solution. Political will is thus the
essential element on the part of the Arabs, Israelis,
and the US.
Our values and our policies are not always in
agreement. The US Government often supports
regimes in the Arab and Muslim world that are inimical to our values but that, in the short term, may
advance some of our policies. Indeed, many Arabs
and Muslims believe that such support indicates that
the US is determined to deny them freedom and political representation. This belief often stems from our
The Berlin Journal
21
u
own ambivalence about the possibility that democracy’s first beneficiaries in the Arab and Muslim world
will be Islamic extremists. It has caught us in a deep
contradiction – one from which public diplomacy, as
well as official diplomacy, could help extricate us. But
we must take these key policy challenges in the region
seriously, and we must minimize the gap between
what we say (the high ideals we espouse) and what we
do (the day–to-day measures we take).
In general, the building up of civil society, of
NGOs, of representative groups, and emerging middle classes is essential for the future of the Arab and
the Muslim world. And that is the generational challenge to address. It is essential to build and support
the middle and, at the same time, to abandon the perception that any change will bring the Islamists to
power. At the same time, we must analyze each country individually, distinguishing Egypt from Syria,
Kuwait from Morocco, etc.
It is understandable that
viewers in the Arab world
don’t trust state-run TV
and radio channels.
***
Mainstream Islam is tolerant and moderate.
Mainstream Muslims want what we all want, for ourselves and for our children: stability, financial security, to be able to educate our children, to live in peace
and security, to have a voice in government and equal
economic opportunities. This is the mainstream. This
is what gives me encouragement. The great challenge
of our time, and the great opportunity, is to make the
zone of tolerance grow and to marginalize the extremists. With those extremists and terrorists who hate
us – those who consider us profane and themselves
sacred – there is no dialogue. We should not be naive
about that.
It is absolutely essential that Europe and the US
begin real substantive strategic coordination on meeting this challenge. This task is not America’s alone. It
involves Europe, Japan, China, Russia, and especially
the Arab countries. The dialogue must be multi-faceted and collaborative.
We have failed to listen and failed to persuade.
We have not taken the time to understand our audience, and we have not bothered to help them understand us. We cannot afford such shortcomings.
The great American baseball legend Casey
Stengel left us a valuable management principle: If
you walk into a room and find, in one corner, six guys
who hate you – who are plotting against you and want
to kill you – and, in the other corner sixty people who
haven’t made up their minds yet, you’d better get to
the sixty before the six get to the sixty. That is public
diplomacy, and that is what our policy objective has
to be in the Muslim world. o
Ambassador Edward Djerejian is founding director of
the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice
University. He was US Ambassador to Israel in 1993 and
Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs in the
administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Other diplomatic posts include serving as US Ambassador
to Syria during the Reagan and first Bush presidencies.
22
Transformation in
the Middle East
A Four-Part Strategy
© Getty Images
By Martin Indyk
The effort to transform the Middle East is again
in the headlines, this time within the context of the
new US strategy toward the “greater Middle East.” But
the effort did not begin with the Bush administration.
As we try to assess the prospects of the current strategy, it is helpful to examine the history of
a previous effort to transform the region, that of
the Clinton administration, which I had the honor
to serve. That administration had, of course,
inherited a peace negotiation from the previous Bush
administration.
The fundamental difference between the
approach of the Clinton administration and that of
the current Bush administration is that we thought
we could transform the region through the engine
of peace, whereas the Bush administration holds
that the way to transform the region is through the
engine of war – in particular, through regime change
in Iraq.
Ours was a two-pronged strategy. The first
was to pursue a policy of comprehensive peace
between Israel and its Arab neighbors: Lebanon,
Syria, Jordan, and the Palestinians. The second was
to contain what we called the rogue states in the
region: Iraq and Iran, in particular, and, to a lesser
extent, Libya. We felt there was a symbiotic relationship between the two strategies; the more successful we were at containing and isolating the regime
of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the ayatollahs in
Iran, the more our efforts to promote comprehensive peace would be supported; and the more effective we were at promoting comprehensive peace, the
more we would succeed in isolating the regimes in
Iraq and Iran.
We made a very clear decision to use peace as
our engine of change. This meant temporarily setting aside goals such as promoting democracy
and political and economic reform. We wanted to
bring the Middle East into the twenty-first century
through a process of peacemaking. Once peace was
achieved, we believed, energies and resources could
then be freed up within the region that would enable
its governments and peoples to focus on these far
more fundamental issues.
Today the Bush administration’s approach
essentially turns this strategy on its head.
Accordingto President Bush’s explanations before
the war, the effort to use force to bring about regime
change in Iraq is intended to create a ripple effect –
to create shockwaves in the region that will facilitate
the promotion of political and economic reform.
Once that is achieved, the administration argues, it
will be possible to promote peace.
Unfortunately, the Clinton administration’s
strategy for transforming the Middle East failed,
even though it had some important successes along
the way (the Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty, for example). But Bush’s current strategy is not in great shape
either. It is worthwhile to look at why we failed, and
to learn what we can from it.
Part of our failure had to do with our willingness to strike a bargain with the key Arab countries
– Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Both countries were and
remain our allies in the region. Egypt in 1993 was
facing a serious challenge from Islamic extremists
who were using terrorism to try to destabilize the
regime. Saudi Arabia was not facing the same challenge, but the regime was deeply religious and autocratic. We judged that any effort to push it toward
democracy would in all likelihood cause instability in a critical part of the Middle East – an area on
which we depended for the free flow of oil at reasonable prices. In both cases, we decided to put aside
the issue of reform.
The Bush Administration
holds that the way to transform the region is through
the engine of war – in particular, through regime
change in Iraq.
What we failed to notice during that period was
that the Saudi and Egyptian regimes were, for the
sake of their own survival and stability, pursuing policies that in effect helped to create a situation that
would hurt us severely on September 11.
We received modest financial assistance from the
Saudis for the peace process, but otherwise they kept
their distance from the effort. The Egyptians were
usually prepared to endorse Yasser Arafat’s decisions,
but they were rarely willing to press him on anything.
They feared that Arafat would turn around and accuse
Egypt of pressuring him, which would have had damaging political consequences that President Hosni
Mubarak was not prepared to risk.
On some occasions, Cairo even opposed
our efforts, especially when it came to promoting Israel’s regional integration. At the critical moment in December 2000 when President
Clinton put forward his parameters for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, both the Saudis u
The Berlin Journal
23
and the Egyptians privately signaled their acquiescence to our proposals. But they failed to provide
any demonstrable support for the deal. And when
Arafat said no, they ran for cover.
When it came to addressing their own internal problems, the Saudis and Egyptians essentially –
and perhaps unintentionally – deflected the opposition onto the US. In the Saudi case, the regime dealt
with its fundamentalist opposition by forcing into
exile its extremists, who then sought refuge and set
up operations outside of Saudi Arabia – in Africa,
Asia, Europe, and of course the US. Saudis, moreover, helped to fund the al-Qaeda network through
their private foundations. And by exporting the
Wahhabi form of Islamic extremism, they helped to
create a fertile environment for the recruitment of
al-Qaeda terrorists.
I am skeptical when people
tell me that the reason for
anti-Americanism in
the Arab world today is that
we are not doing enough
to solve the Palestinian
problem.
The Egyptian government cracked down on its
Islamic extremists, but it also excluded other, more
moderate voices from the political arena. As general alienation in Egypt grew with the regime’s inability to meet the people’s basic needs, younger people moved toward the extremist mosques and, often
from there, into Afghanistan. There was no room left
for a political center to emerge between the regime
itself and the Islamic extremists. Any criticism that
arose was deflected from the regime onto the US and
Israel. As a result, growing anti-Americanism founds
its voice just as we were vigorously pursuing a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, when Arafat
was the most frequent foreign visitor to the White
House. That is why I am skeptical when people tell
me that the reason for anti-Americanism in the Arab
world today is that we are not doing enough to solve
the Palestinian problem.
Today, it is essential to develop a policy that
deals specifically with these two critically important
countries. Above all, such a policy must address the
funding of extremist organizations. The Saudis have
begun to take measures, as when on March 8, they
introduced a new law designed to control the funding of such organizations.
Beyond that, we have to encourage Saudi
Arabia and Egypt to open up political space for their
citizens. Room for political expression needs to be
created between the authoritarianism of the governments and the extremism that is cultivated in particular fundamentalist mosques. Reasonable people
in civil society need an environment in which their
efforts can be strengthened.
We must encourage these regimes to take the
lead in promoting greater tolerance in their own
societies, in promoting educational and religious
reforms. The Clinton administration was told time
and again by Egyptian and Saudi leaders that noth24
ing could be done internally before the Palestinian
problem was solved. It tried to forge peace without receiving any significant support from those
regimes. It ignored the problems internal to the
Saudi and Egyptian regimes, however. Those problems came back to bite us on September 11.
But if pursuing peace without pressing for
reform was a mistaken policy, so too is the current
Bush administration’s effort to promote reform
without pressing for peace. In this regard, I fear that
the Bush administration has learned the wrong lesson from our experience. We need to find the middle way between the two. German Foreign Minister
Joschka Fischer is in fact suggesting such a course,
and his basic point is the right one. We must promote political reform at the same time that we seek
to support a viable peace process. Each should reinforce the other.
***
Effective transformation in the Middle East
requires a four-part strategy. George Bush began to
articulate such a strategy before he launched the war
in Iraq. Unfortunately this has now morphed into
a two-part strategy focused on stabilizing the situation in Iraq, on the one hand, and promoting the
idea of transformation, on the other. If the other
two branches – containing rogues states and resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – continue to be
ignored, the overall strategy will fail.
The first part of this four-part strategy is indeed
to stabilize Iraq. The administration’s argument
that regime change there could create an advantageous ripple effect throughout the region is essentially right. But if we do not succeed in stabilizing
the situation and putting the Iraqi people on the
road toward a firm, pluralistic government that can
represent all of the interests of the different Iraqi
communities, then the chances for any ripple effect
are very slim.
Indeed, there is a real danger that the opposite
will take place, that a failure in Iraq would generate instability – a negative ripple effect throughout
the region. If Iraq dissolves into sectarian conflict
between Sunnis and Shias it will make the so-called
“clash of civilizations” look like a tea party. In this
case, the chances for any kind of serious political
reform would go out the window, as regimes batten down the hatches to protect themselves from the
destabilizing effects of integrating Iraq.
The first requirement is thus to stabilize the situation there, provide basic security for the Iraqi people, and lay the groundwork for a pluralistic Iraqi
government. It was quite heartening to see the signing of the provisional constitution on March 8 as a
step toward that overall objective. But the situation
in Iraq currently remains very dangerous and insecure. And it could get a lot worse, particularly in the
run-up to the US elections. Foreign al-Qaeda-led elements are doing their best to cause chaos in Iraq,
as a way not only to defeat the US in Iraq (as they
defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan), but also
to defeat George Bush in the elections.
The second part of this strategy has to be a
more effective policy for dealing with those same
rogue states that we in the Clinton administration
sought to contain – Iran, in particular, and to a lesser extent, Syria. Though it labeled Iran as part of
the “axis of evil,” the Bush administration has not
developed an effective policy toward it. Instead, a
policy vacuum prevails. This is highly problematic in terms of our overall strategy and, in particular,
the idea of promoting democracy in the region. We
saw this in the recent Iranian elections, as the US
and even Europe remained silent while the Iranian
hard-liners essentially hijacked the elections and
suppressed the reform movement.
If we stood idly by while the government in
Iran – which is hardly a friendly regime to the
US – suppressed democracy, what does this indicate about how we will act with regimes like Saudi
Arabia and Egypt that are our friends? It suggests
that those people who have been looking toward
the US and Europe for support in their efforts to
promote democratic reform within their countries
will not receive it. And as a consequence, they will
be reluctant to stand up.
As is well known, the most aggressive support for Palestinian terrorism comes from Iran.
The terrorist organization Palestine Islamic Jihad
is a creature of the Iranian intelligence services.
Trained by the Iranian revolutionary guard corps
and funded by Tehran, it takes its orders directly from Tehran via its headquarters in Damascus.
Tracing the course of the intifada, we can see that
whenever Hamas was prepared to reduce terrorism, it was Palestine Islamic Jihad that went out and
launched another terrorist attack, provoking an
Israeli retaliation and renewing the cycle of attack
and response.
We are, moreover, far from achieving an effective means of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, although Europeans have taken the
lead in developing an approach.
If Iraq dissolves into sectarian conflict it will make the
so-called “clash of civilizations” look like a tea party.
The third branch of this overall strategy is to
promote democracy and encourage political, economic, and educational reform in the Arab world.
Importantly, there also needs to be a component
of religious reform, though this has yet to be articulated either by the Bush administration or by
Europeans in the current discussion of the “greater
Middle East.”
The strategy requires further differentiation.
First there are the four large regional Arab powers –
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria. In Iraq’s case,
successful democratic practices could generate pressure for reform elsewhere in the region. Syria’s regime
is essentially frozen and impenetrable (at least for
the time being) to our efforts to encourage reform. In
Saudi Arabia and Egypt we need to be conscious of the
risk of recreating the situation that prevailed under
the Shah of Iran. In that case, our attempt to move
the Shah’s regime toward greater political openness
destabilized the country. In Egypt and Saudi Arabia
too much change too quickly might end up aiding the
very people whom we are trying to keep from power:
the Islamic extremists. For they are well organized and
have benefited from the regime’s suppression of the
quieter, more moderate voices for political reform and
are, at present, in the best position to take advantage
of any kind of political opening.
essary for its own sake. Israel and the Palestinians
need a resolution of their conflict, and they cannot
do it on their own. They need our help.
To avoid undertaking crucial reforms, critics throughout the Arab world have told us that we
need to solve the Palestinian problem first. We need
to be able to respond, “We are doing that, but you
have to address your problems too.”
Reforming the systems in these countries
means enhancing the dignity of the people, but their
dignity is, at the moment, deeply offended by what
they see of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
Pursuing peace will help to address the “dignity
deficit.”
Because of these risks, we must engage the leadThe most important reason for addressing this
ership of Egypt and Saudi Arabia in a serious diaas part of our overall strategy for transformation in
logue. Announcing our plans in public before talkthe Middle East is that the Palestinians could well
ing to them risks giving offense. In the Clinton
serve as a model for political change and promotion
administration we worked very closely – and with
of democracy throughout the region.
some success – with President Mubarak on an ecoHow?
nomic reform program. Much of that success came
At the moment there is a failed state-in-thefrom the fact that Vice President Gore engaged
making in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian
President Mubarak directly and regularly, explainAuthority is collapsing. Arafat is a failed and dising the economic reforms and supporting him as he
credited leader, yet he obstructs every effort made
took risks.
by genuine Palestinian reformers to assert order
Beyond Saudi Arabia and Egypt are the smallin the face of growing anarchy. There is a desperer Arab states: countries like Jordan, Morocco,
ate need for a new Palestinian leadership to emerge,
Tunisia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Yemen, and the
without which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will
United Arab Emirates.
not be resolved.
Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain, and even Qatar,
My recent discussions in Europe suggest that
have new leaders from a younger generation who
the issue simply does not compute here. The conunderstand very well what is needed in terms of
ventional wisdom in Europe seems to be that
the process of introducing political and econombecause Yossi Beilin, former Israeli Minister of
ic reforms. Not surprisingly, they are already taking
Justice, and Yasser Abed Rabbo, former Palestinian
the kinds of steps that we want to encourage in the
Authority Information Minister, solved the probbigger Arab states. This has to do not only with the
lem in their Geneva Accords, the US simply needs
more progressive views of these leaders but also the
to impose the solution on the two parties. It is
fact that their countries have less at stake than the
not so simple. For, at the moment, there is no
bigger Arab powers.
Palestinian leadership to deal with. And until there
These smaller Arab states can serve as models of is a Palestinian leadership capable, responsible, and
reform and have leaders whom we can work with. One accountable to the Palestinian people, there will not
might view them as case studies that show how the
be any deal – no matter how clear the outlines of a
same kinds of things might be done on a larger scale. settlement are to us or, for that matter, to the Israelis
When Qatar, for example, takes steps to give women
and Palestinians (the majority of whom would supthe vote, it has an impact on neighboring Saudi
port a two-state solution on both sides). Part of our
Arabia, where women are still denied that right.
strategy for transformation in the region thus has to
The combined effort to work with the smallfocus on the question of how to promote democraer states, to stabilize Iraq and use it as a model
cy in Palestine. How can we build a new Palestinian
for the larger states, and to partner the Saudi and
leadership?
Egyptian leadership in reform efforts is an ambitious one. But we should not take on the task unless
we are prepared for that moment when the people
in the region – be it in the smaller states or in the
larger ones – take our efforts seriously and actually stand up and demand their rights. How will we
act then? Consider a country like Tunisia, which has
embarked on major economic reforms but has completely restricted any political reforms. How would
we act if a political reform movement started there?
The example of our lack of support for the reformers in Iran bodes badly. The people in the region will
be watching very closely to see whether we are serious about such efforts. And if we are not prepared to
The problem is urgent. Now more than ever, we
stand with them when they are beaten up and incarneed a responsible Palestinian partner, because the
cerated, we should not even set forth on this course.
Israeli people have decided they do not want to be in
The fourth and final branch of this strategy is to
the West Bank and Gaza anymore and are pressing
pursue peace between Israel and its neighbors, partheir government to withdraw.
ticularly between Israel and the Palestinians. That
Prime Minister Sharon has suggested there will
peace is part of the effort. Of course, it is also necbe a withdrawal unilaterally from Gaza and from
If we stood idly by while the
government in Iran suppressed democracy, how
will we act with regimes
that are our friends?
Until there is a Palestinian
leadership capable,
responsible, and accountable to the Palestinian
people, there will not be
any deal.
part (probably fifty percent) of the West Bank. Such
withdrawal would create a vacuum, a vacuum that
the current Palestinian Authority is incapable of filling. If we don’t find a way to fill that vacuum in a
positive way, it will be filled by gangs and warlords
and Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad extremists.
If we are serious about promoting democracy and peace, we – and here I mean Europe and the
United States together – must help responsible
Palestinians fill that vacuum. This is crucial to our
overall strategy. It is going to require an international intervention similar to what was carried out
in Kosovo and East Timor, which the US has recently begun to discuss with the government of Israel.
An Israeli withdrawal from
Gaza will create a
vacuum. We must help
responsible Palestinians
fill that vacuum.
I believe that there is a way to do this. Such an
effort would require a UN-Security- Council-blessed,
US-led, European-partnered initiative to create conditions for the emergence of a new, democratically
elected Palestinian leadership. It would require limited special forces under NATO to back up a restructured and retrained Palestinian security force, which
would have responsibility for maintaining order in
the areas vacated by Israel. The international presence could then oversee elections in accordance
with the constitution that Palestinians have already
drafted, empowering their prime minister and taking power away from Arafat. In this way we can help
them build democratic political institutions, transparent economic institutions, and an independent
judiciary. And once a responsible, capable, and
accountable Palestinian leadership is formed, it can
enter into negotiations with Israel for a final settlement of this conflict. (See my article “A Trusteeship
for Palestine” in the May/June 2003 issue of Foreign
Affairs, pp. 51–66.)
The four-part effort to transform the Middle
East described above builds on what President
Bush wants to do in terms of promoting democracy in the region but also places it within a context of
peacemaking. By stabilizing the situation in Iraq;
by countering the rogue regimes; by standing up for
the little guy (both supporting the reform efforts of
smaller states in the region and by lending strength
to those still small voices for political reform in
the larger states); and by promoting the IsraeliPalestinian peace process through a US-European
intervention in Palestine, I believe we can meet this
daunting but noble objective. And in the process, we
can help to bring both democracy and peace to the
Middle East.o
Ambassador Martin S. Indyk founded and directs the Saban
Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution
and was founding executive director of the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy. He served as US Assistant
Secretary of State for Near East Affairs from 1997 to 2000
and as US Ambassador to Israel from 1995 to 1997 and from
2000 to June 2001.
The Berlin Journal
25
Gillette
NOTEBOOK of the ACADEMY
Charitable Counsel
Fellowship Honors Lloyd Cutler
in at the end of the month of May with
the prestigious Boston-based law firm of
Hale and Dorr.
Dieter Lange, Wilmer Cutler’s senior
European partner, practices from the
firm’s London, Brussels, and Berlin
offices. He is co-chairman of the firm’s
International Practice Group. Roger
Witten, the senior litigation partner in
the firm’s New York office, recently led
a victorious Wilmer Cutler legal team
in the US Supreme Court’s decision to
uphold the McCain-Feingold Campaign
finance reform law.
Inaugurating the fellowships
next fall will be Hiroshi Motomura,
Horst Köhler, former director of the IMF
and longtime Academy trustee, will in all
likelihood be elected the next president
of the Federal Republic of Germany. He
was nominated in March by the CDU, CSU,
and FDP, parties that will enjoy a majority
when members of the Federal Convention
cast their votes on May 23. His rival, SPD
candidate Gesine Schwan, visited the
Hans Arnhold Center a week before the
nominations were made public, leading
a fellows’ seminar on her experiences
as president of the Viadrina European
University in Frankfurt (Oder).
Richard von Weizsäcker, one of the
Academy’s founders, held the presidential
post for two terms between 1984 and
1994. It was during the last year of his
tenure that the inspired idea of forging
a strong, private institution to promote
German and American cultural exchange
was announced.
Mr. Köhler is the first German to head the
IMF, a post he took up in 2000. Between
1990 and 1993, as deputy finance minister
under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, he was
a chief negotiator of the agreement that
became Maastricht and was closely
involved in German unification, devising,
among other things, a way to fund the Red
Army’s withdrawal from the former GDR.
He served as president of the German
Savings Bank Association from 1993 to
1998, the year he was appointed to head
the European Bank of Reconstruction and
Development.
The international law firm of Wilmer
Cutler & Pickering announced last
November that it will support a semesterlong Fellowship named in honor of
trustee Lloyd Cutler for the next three
years. Two partners, Dieter Lange and
Roger Witten, were instrumental in
making possible the fellowship, which
Academy President Robert Mundheim
greeted as a “splendid gesture.” Mr.
Mundheim is confident that the prize,
which gives preference to outstanding
applicants from the field of law, will
“draw even better lawyers and law
academic applicants to the Academy’s
program.”
Mr. Cutler, born in 1917, served as
Counsel to both the Clinton and the
Carter administrations and maintains an
active practice in several fields, including international arbitration and dispute
resolution, constitutional law, appellate
advocacy, and public policy advice.
Trustee Gahl Burt, who brought Mr.
Cutler to the Academy’s board in 1998,
toasted him at a celebratory dinner in
Washington to mark the announcement.
“I can think of no wiser sounding board
for our young organization than Lloyd
Cutler. Indeed, we wouldn’t have our
president, Robert Mundheim, were it not
for him,” she said.
In addition to the Academy’s board,
Mr. Cutler has served a number of other
institutions, most notably as chairman
of the board of the Salzburg Seminar;
as co-chairman of the Committee on
the Constitutional System; as a member of the Council of the American Law
Institute; and as trustee emeritus of
the Brookings Institution and member of its executive committee. He was a
founder and co-chairman of the Lawyers
Committee on Civil Rights under Law.
The firm that Lloyd Cutler helped
found in Washington in 1962 now has
more than five hundred international
lawyers in offices in Washington, Berlin,
New York, London, Brussels, Baltimore,
and Northern Virginia and will merge
Academy Trustee
Köhler Nominated for
German Presidency
Dan K. Moore Distinguished
Professor of Law at the University
of North Carolina School of Law.
Motomura’s project, “Germany: a
Country of Immigration or a Nation
of Immigrants?” examines current
trends in German immigration and
citizenship law. The author, most
recently, of Americans-in-Waiting:
the Ambivalent Story of Immigration
and Citizenship in the United States
plans to take full advantage of the
rich comparative terrain from his
vantage point in Berlin.
“As the first Lloyd Cutler Fellow,
you will be, I hope, the first in along
line to honor our trustee, one of
the most distinguished US
practitioners of the second half of
the twentieth century,” wrote Mr.
Mundheim in a congratulatory
letter to Professor Motomura.o
Academy trustees Lloyd Cutler and Henry Kissinger at the second New Traditions conference, 1998.
Mr. Köhler joined the American Academy’s
board in 1998 through the good offices of
honorary chairmen Thomas L. Farmer and
Richard C. Holbrooke and negotiated a
substantial gift on the part of the German
Savings Bank Association at that critical
early stage. Mr. Farmer greeted the news
of his nomination enthusiastically. “Horst
Köhler is a man of quiet determination
who has a clear concept for a revived
Germany in both the European and
transatlantic framework.”o
The Berlin Journal
27
Photograph by Mike Minehan
Midtown Manhattan came to Mitte as part of the Neue Nationalgalerie’s blockbuster exhibition “MoMA in Berlin.” To mark the occasion, the Academy organized a series of discussions. “Curating Modernity” began this March with a talk
between MoMA curator Ann Temkin (opposite page, upper right) and art historian Robert Rosenblum (shown above, right, with the Academy’s president Robert Mundheim). Upcoming events are listed on page 38.
Guest Appearances
Notes from the Spring Program
This spring the Academy welcomed five
official Distinguished Visitors to the Hans
Arnhold Center: Berlin-born composer
Lukas Foss, SEC Corporation Finance
Director Alan Beller, and three seasoned
American diplomats, Martin Indyk,
Edward Djerejian, and Dennis Ross. Other
speakers from the areas of economics,
history, and literature contributed the
public program as well.
Lester Thurow’s January lecture drew
its title from his book, Fortune Favors the
Bold: Building Lasting Global Prosperity,
which argues that in order to prosper and,
indeed, to survive in the globalized world,
states must build economic systems that
embrace globalization. The author of the
1980 bestseller The Zero-Sum Society and
Building Wealth is professor at mit’s Sloan
School of management.
28
Legal expert Charles Fried, a former
Solicitor General in the Reagan administration, lectured in early March on
“The Concept of Liberty Implicit in US
Constitutional Law.” In his talk, the
Harvard professor and former judge
traced the origins of our contemporary
understanding of free speech to the Dred
Scott Decision of 1857 and explored the
implications of free speech on a range of
today’s hot-button topics, from same-sex
marriage to campaign finance reform.
While in Berlin, Mr. Fried also participated in a lively argument with German legal
experts at the Heinrich Böll Foundation on
the legal situation of prisoners currently in
US detention in Guantanamo, Cuba.
The Academy’s president Robert
Mundheim happily persuaded Alan Beller,
director of the Division of Corporation
Finance at the US Securities and Exchange
Commission, to participate in the biannual JP Morgan Economic Policy Briefs
in late April. The well-recognized expert
on corporate and securities law presented
his views on regulation in a global economic environment, a topic of considerable interest to members of the German
business community.
The ongoing discussion of the corporate oversight continues into June when
William McDonough, chairman of the
Public Company Accounting Oversight
Board (pcaob), addresses “the Challenge
of National Jurisdictions and a Global
Economy.” After ten years as president
and ceo of the Federal Reserve Bank of
New York, Mr. McDonough was nominated in 2003 by the SEC to chair the pcaob,
a private-sector, non-profit corporation
created by the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act
in order to oversee the auditors of public
companies.
Toward the end of June, the Academy
will welcome Anne Krueger, managing
director ad interim of the International
Monetary Fund, who will assess the imf’s
role in the global economy sixty years after
its founding. Ms. Krueger has been with
the imf since 2001 and has overseen its
activities during a complex period of global crises as well as growth. She previously
was a professor at Stanford’s department
of economics and was the World Bank’s
vice president for economics and research
from 1982 to 1986.
Twentieth-century German history is always a topic of great importance
at the American Academy in Berlin.
This semester, two very different scholars contributed to the discussion. Jürgen
Kocka, noted historian and president
of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für
Sozialforschung, gave the second annual
Fritz Stern Lecture in early May, addressing the theoretical “Problem of Freedom
in German History” before the assembled board of trustees and special guests.
Gerhard Casper, an Academy trustee and
President Emeritus of Stanford University,
moderated the discussion.
In early April Jörg Friedrich, freelance
historian and author of the controversial
and extremely successful book Der Brand
(forthcoming in an English translation)
presented a sweeping overview of war in
the twentieth century, with a focus on the
practice he calls “urbicide” – the destruction of cities – with examples drawn in
particular from the Allied aerial bombardment of Dresden, Essen, and other
German cities during World War II.
At the other end of the program spectrum, cultural life at the Academy has
been particularly rich this spring. Fellow
Elizabeth McCracken and her husband,
British writer and playwright Edward
Carey have been in residence all semester, as was writer Norman Manea for the
month of March. The Romanian-born
professor at Bard College gave readings
all over Germany from his recent memoir The Hooligan’s Return. Manea’s stay as
Writer-in-Residence at the Academy was
itself a sort of return, since it was a daad
fellowship in the German capital that first
enabled him to leave Ceaucescu’s oppressive Romania in 1986. Manea’s numerous
novels, volumes of shorter fiction, prose
pieces, and poems have been translated
into twenty languages.
Author Colson Whitehead stayed at
the Hans Arnhold Center during a chilly
February week and warmed up the house
with a reading from his second novel.
John Henry Days is the story of a hack
writer who is sent reluctantly to cover a
small-town festival commemorating the
American folk hero John Henry. Fellows
and guests were also treated to passages
from Whitehead’s newest book,
The Colossus of New York, a series of takes
on his beloved native city.
A week later, writer Candace Allen
read from her debut novel Valaida, which
recounts the life of African-American jazz
trumpet virtuoso Valaida Snow. Allen
scoured two continents for biographical material relating to her elusive subject,
which she then supplemented with many
richly imagined characters and settings.
Allen, who was the first African-American
female member of the Directors Guild of
America, lives in London but is a frequent
visitor to Berlin, where her husband Simon
Rattle directs the Berlin Philharmonic. After
the reading, Richard Bernstein of the Berlin
bureau of the New York Times moderated a
lively discussion about the rich tradition of
African-American expatriates in Europe.
German-born Composer Samuel Adler,
who arrives at the Academy toward the end
of the semester, will continue his reflections on the relationship between German
and American music. His extensive catalogue includes over four hundred published
works, as well as three books. Mr. Adler currently teaches at the Julliard School of Music
in New York. As Composer-in-Residence at
the Academy, he will give a lecture-recital
on “the Second German Transformation of
American Music, 1933–60.” o
Siemens Shows
its Support :
Three-Year
Fellowship
Announced
Siemens AG, one of the American
Academy’s founding benefactors, continues
its generous support by funding a Siemens
Fellowship at the Hans Arnhold Center for
the next three years. Thanks to President
and CEO Heinrich von Pierer and Senior
Vice President and Chief Economist Bernd
Stecher, the first Siemens Fellow will take
up residence at the Academy during the fall
semester of 2004.
With 65,000 employees and 11 of its worldwide businesses based in the US, Siemens is
a firm that well understands the importance
of strengthening the ties between Germany
and the US. Last year, the US produced
approximately 21 percent of Siemens’ worldwide business and generated $15.9 billion in
new orders. In the same year, Siemens USA
was a major exporter, generating more than
13 percent of sales ($2.2 billion) to overseas
customers.
Photograph by Michael Herrmann
The US is not only one of the electrical engineering and electronics giant’s largest markets, it is also the site of many of the company’s philanthropic activities. These include
support for science research courses at top
US universities and donates about $1 million annually in scholarships and awards.
Last year it dedicated more than $12 million to additional corporate citizenship and
community affairs activities. It is hardly
surprising, then, that the company shares
the Academy’s goal of promoting GermanAmerican dialogue in a wide range of cultural and academic fields.
This fall, Siemens and the Academy look forward to welcoming the inaugural Siemens
Fellow, Lothar Haselberger, a professor of
archaelogy at the University of Pennsylvania. o
Writer-in-residence Norman Manea and his wife, art restorer Cella Manea.
The Berlin Journal
29
Alumni Accomplishments
Awards, Appointments, Activities
Academy Alumni have been busy in
Washington. Adam Garfinkle (spring
’03) left the National Interest for a job at the
State Department as chief speechwriter
for Secretary of State Colin Powell. Chris
Kojm (spring ’01) has been appointed
Deputy Executive Director of the National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon
the United States, an independent,
bipartisan commission created in late
2002. Two Academy Alumni were active
in the election-year Democratic primaries.
As Derek Chollet (spring ’02) worked
on the staff of candidate Senator John
Edwards, advising on international affairs,
Benjamin Barber (fall ’01) advised
Howard Dean’s campaign. Further afield,
Howard m. Wachtel (fall ’99) was
appointed to a 12-person commission
constituted by Jacques Chirac to prepare
a report for him on global taxation for the
next G8 meeting.
In the newsroom, journalist Nina
Bernstein (fall ’02) has been covering
US immigration policy in the post-September 11 climate for the New York Times. Her
two-part series on the declining pregnancy
rates among American teenagers was
launched with a lengthy front-page piece
on March 7. Belinda Cooper (fall ’02)
has published a number of articles, book
reviews, and travel pieces in the Times
and was recently in Israel working on a
documentary film.
Biographical pieces by current fellow
Elizabeth McCracken and several
Academy alumni were included in the
December 28, 2003 issue of New York
Times Magazine, which was devoted to
“The Lives They Lived”; McCracken
profiled Doris Fowler, author of Standing
Room Only; Nicholas Dawidoff
(spring ’02) wrote about Doris Bauer, a
frequent late-night caller to the wfan
program well known among radio sports
fans; and David Rieff (spring ’03)
contributed a portrait of UN Special
Envoy to Iraq Sergio Viera de Mello who
was killed by terrorists in Baghdad last
August. A few months later, Jeffrey
Eugenides (2000–01), whose novel
Middlesex is a bestseller in German as well
as in its English and American editions,
hosted McCracken at a reading at the
Cologne Literature Festival.
Artist Sue De Beer ’s 2-channel video
installation “Hans und Grete,” which she
worked on during her 2002–03 year in
Berlin, is on view at the Whitney Biennial
in New York between March and June.
An installation by artist Stephanie
Snider “Es war einmal et. al.,” also
worked on during a prolonged Berlin
residence, was on view in March and April
at the Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin.
IV and Wanderlied will be performed
this spring in Avignon, Strasbourg, and
Montreal.
The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, a collaboration between Cartoonist Ben
Katchor (spring ’02) and composer
Mark Mulcahy had another successful performance at The Kitchen in New York in
late March. The “Tragicomedy for Music
Theater” makes use of projections and animations by Katchor.
Among our academic alumni, it seems to
be an especially rich season for fellowships,
honors, and appointments. James
Sheehan (spring ’01) has been elected
president of the American Historical
Association. Historian Margaret
Lavinia Anderson (spring ’01) won an
acls fellowship for next year. Her article
“A German Way of War?” was published in
the January 2004 issue of German History.
Psychologist Laura L. Carstensen
(spring’02) is using funds from her 2003
Guggenheim Fellowship to research her
next book, about the sudden extension
of life expectancy in the 20th century.
is the largest prize given for a single book of Anthropologist Ruth Mandel (Fall ’00)
poetry. “Middle Earth is a book of extraordi- was awarded a 2004–05 fellowship at the
nary grace and power,” says previous Tufts Woodrow Wilson International Center in
Award winner Robert Wrigley, who chaired Washington DC to work on a critique of
the panel that chose Cole . “It’s very much international development in Central Asia,
a book about a personal voyage into selfbased on recent research in Kazakhstan.
hood. It’s a very brave book. He’s a craftsArt historian W.J.T. Mitchell (fall ’02)
man of the highest order.” Henri Cole
will be back in Berlin in 2004-2005 as a
is currently poet-in-residence at Smith
Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg. Mitchell
College.
delivers the Goddard Lectures this spring
High Art for flute and toy piano by
at the University of California, Berkeley.
Martin Bresnick (spring ’01) was
Another prestigious lecture series will be
performed in a concert featuring congiven by Richard Sennett (spring
temporary American music at the Berlin
’02), the 2003–4 Castle Lecturer in Ethics,
Philharmonic in early March. Laura
Politics and Economics at Yale.
Schwendinger ’s Nonet, a 15-minute
Steven Szabo (fall ’02) has been
work in three movements will be premiered appointed the Steven Muller Chair at the
and broadcast on wfmt in Chicago on
Johns Hopkins Bologna Center for the
June 14. The Fromm Foundation commisyear 2004–05. Michael Meltsner
sioned the composer (spring ’00) to write
(fall ’00), currently director of the Firstfor the Chicago Chamber Musicians. Her
Year Lawyering Program at the Harvard
piece Lontano, commissioned by the cube Law School, was Hengeler-Müller-Guest
ensemble, also premiered this spring. Two Professor at the University of Freiburg in
works by Betsy Jolas (fall ’00) Motet
the summer of 2003. o
Poet C.K. Williams (fall ’98) received
the National Book Award for his new collection, The Singing, admired in the New York
Times Book Review for its “scorching honesty.” Williams was honored during a ceremony in New York. Henri Cole (spring
’01) won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
for his collection Middle Earth. The award
Two drawings from the “Landscript” series by current Coca-Cola Fellow Xu Bing (ink on nepalese paper, 2001) delineate traditional landscapes in rapid,
elegant Chinese characters (for rock, tree, rain, etc.). A related series of installations transposes the same concept to the urban environment; word-masses trace the outlines of
apartment blocks and other city elements onto the glass windows of the exhibition space.
30
The Berlin Prize Fellowships 2005–2006
The American Academy in Berlin invites applications for its fellowships
for the 2005-2006 academic year. The Academy is a private, non-profit
center for advanced reasearch in a range of academic, cultural, and
professional areas. It welcomes younger as well as established scholars,
artists, and professionals who wish to engage in independent study
in Berlin for an academic semester or, in special cases, for an entire
academic year.
The Academy, which opened in September 1998, occupies the
Hans Arnhold Center, a historic lakeside villa in the Wannsee district
of Berlin. Fellowships have been awarded to writers and poets, public
policy experts, journalists and cultural critics, economists, historians,
legal scholars, theologians, art historians, linguists, composers and
musicologists, painters and sculptors, and filmmakers.
Named prizes include the Bosch Fellowship in Public Policy, the
George Herbert Walker Bush Fellowship, the Citigroup Fellowship, the
Coca-Cola Fellowship, the Lloyd Cutler Fellowship, the DaimlerChrysler
Fellowship, the Gillette Fellowship, the Ellen Maria Gorrissen
Fellowship, the Haniel Foundation Fellowship, the Holtzbrinck
Fellowship in Journalism, the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellowship, the J.P.
Morgan Prize, the Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts,
and the Siemens Fellowship.
Sneak Preview
The Fall 2004 Fellows
A talented group of scholars and artists
chosen by an independed selection committee are expected at the Hans Arnhold
Center next fall. Civil rights historian Jane
Dailey (Johns Hopkins University) and
medievalist art historian Lawrence Nees
(University of Delaware) were awarded
Berlin Prize Fellowships. Other art historians in residence will include Ellen Maria
Gorrissen Fellow Christopher Wood (Yale
US citizens and permanent residents are eligible to apply. (All applicants
must permanently based in the US.) Fellows are expected to be in residence
at the Academy during the entire term of the award. The Academy offers
furnished apartments suitable for individuals and couples. Only very limited accommodations are available for families with children. Benefits
include a monthly stipend, round-trip airfare, housing at the Academy,
and partial board. Stipends range from $3000 to $5000 per month.
Application forms can be downloaded from the Academy’s web site
(www.americanacademy.de) or obtained upon request. Applications and
accompanying materials must be received in Berlin by October 25, 2004
(with the exception of applications in the visual arts and music, which are
due in New York by December 1, 2004). Candidates need not be German
specialists, but the project description should explain how a residency in
Berlin will contribute to further professional development.
Applications will be reviewed by an independent selection committee
following a peer review process. The 2005–2006 Fellows will be chosen in
January 2005 and publicly announced in the spring.
American Academy in Berlin
Am Sandwerder 17–19
D-14109 Berlin, Germany
Telephone +49 (30) 804 83 - 0
Fax +49 (30) 804 83 - 111
[email protected]
University) and Benjamin Binstock (New
York University), the semester’s AnnaMaria Kellen Fellow. Archaeologist and
ancient Rome expert Lothar Haselberger
(University of Pennsylvania) inaugurates
the Siemens Fellowship. Writer Hilton Als,
theater critic for the New Yorker magazine,
will be a Holtzbrinck Fellow. Noted filmmaker Hal Hartley will hold the Citigroup
Fellowship, and independent poet Gjertrud
THE
AMERICAN
ACADEMY
IN BERLIN
Hans Arnhold Center
C. Schnackenberg will be the Coca-Cola
Fellow. Hiroshi Motomura (University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill) inaugurates
the Lloyd Cutler Fellowship. The George H.
W. Bush Fellow will be political scientist Alan
Wolfe (Boisi Center for Religion and Public
Life at Boston College). Finally, political scientists Jytte Klausen (Brandeis University)
and Ezra Suleiman (Princeton University)
will hold Bosch Public Policy Fellowships.o
The Berlin Journal
31
LIFE
&
LETTERS
at the Hans Arnhold Center
The Spring 2004 Fellows
Profiles in Scholarship
By Miranda Robbins
Andrew Bacevich, a military analyst and
Portraits by Mike Minehan
professor of political science at Boston
University, is writing a broad study of
militarism in American life from the
Vietnam war through the present. The
former US Army officer is one of two
inaugural George H. W. Bush Fellows
at the Academy this spring and the
author, most recently, of American
Empire: the Realities and Consequences of
US Diplomacy. Concerned by the recent
implementation in Iraq of the doctrine of
preventive war and by the trend toward
the militarization of US foreign policy,
Bacevich is tracking the cultural and
societal impact of a new civil-military
tension. The “citizen soldier” of the past
has been replaced by “a professional
military that sees itself as culturally
and politically set apart from the rest
of American society.” The pro-military
stance of the Christian Right; antimilitarism within the American elite; the
increasingly politicization of the officer
corps; the shifting depiction of the
military in popular culture are some of
the factors related to that tension.
Counter terrorism expert Daniel
Benjamin, a senior fellow since 2001 at the
Center for Strategic and International
Studies in the International Security
Program, arrives in May for a short-term
Bosch fellowship. The former German
correspondent for the Wall Street Journal
and TIME served on Clinton’s National
32
Security Council between 1994 and 1999
and as director of transnational threats
there from 1998 to 1999. The New York
Times called his 2002 book The Age of
Sacred Terror (co-authored with Steven
Simon) “a lively – and disturbing – tale
of bureaucratic vexation.” Benjamin
is currently measuring the success
of collaborative efforts to defeat the
terrorist threat posed by al-Qaeda
and related organizations. He will
explore immediate intelligence, law
enforcement, and military challenges as
well as longer-term issues of the “root”
demographic, environmental, political,
and economic problems that contribute
to the spread of radical Islam. He delivers
the annual Lisa and Heinrich Arnhold
Lecture in Dresden in mid May.
unable to make responsible decisions
without aid.” Case’s study promises to
have an impact on abortion debates in
both the US and Germany.
DaimlerChrysler Fellow David Ferris
will look back on two centuries of Bach
reception for a book about the most
illustrious of J.S. Bach’s many musical
sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel (1714 –
1788). The second son’s life is ripe for a
critical biography, one that comments
on rather than perpetuating the various
myths that have long fueled Bach family
histories. These range from the myth
of divine succession to scenarios of
Romantic rebellion and Freudian failure.
Mary Anne Case is a professor at the
University of Chicago’s law school, where
she teaches feminist jurisprudence,
constitutional law, European legal
systems, and regulation of sexuality.
From Berlin as a Bosch Fellow she is
probing the contradictions within
German abortion law – inconsistencies
that the German legal and political
communities have preferred to downplay
since abortion law was revisited after
unification. The German constitution
guarantees the right of the fetus to life,
and abortions “remain characterized
as wrongful acts.” But if a woman
undergoes counseling, she may abort
in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy
without risk of criminal sanctions.
Case is especially critical of mandatory
counseling. The system would not be so
“anomalous,” she writes, “if counseling
were a well-established practice under
present-day German law, if persons
seeking to engage in a wide variety of acts
were required to undergo counseling
beforehand.” The system, however,
“encourages a view of women as uniquely
c.p.e. himself promoted his father’s
posthumous reputation and supervised
publication of his works. In his Father’s
Image: the Historical Identity of c.p.e.
Bach will be more than a book about
the anxiety of influence, however. Ferris
gives a close analysis of the music,
examining the “underlying aesthetic
affinity” as well as the vast stylistic
differences in the works of both Bachs.
With a trove of original manuscripts
on hand in the Statsbibliothek, it is an
especially inviting project to undertake
from Berlin. Ferris, an assistant professor
of musicology at Rice University, is also
an expert on Romantic song cycles, of
Schumann in particular.
Chicago-based labor lawyer and present
Holtzbrinck Fellow Thomas Geoghegan
has devoted three wry, passionately
argued books to factors ailing the US
today: the collapse of unions (Which
Side are you On?), the withdrawal from
civic life (The Secret Lives of Citizens),
and the high rate of imprisonment (In
America’s Court). Europe, in contrast,
enjoys strong unions, a high degree of
civic participation, and comparatively
low levels of incarceration. The Englishspeaking press, however, tends to focus
on the continent’s problems rather than
the virtues of its social democracies,
depicting the German social state in
particular as backward, plagued by
unemployment, and fearful of risk
taking. “Even American liberals readily
assume that our system, for all its flaws,
is superior.” Geoghegan is processing his
observations of Germany and Europe
into a narrative of “discovery by an
innocent abroad” and, doing so, will
state the case for “outright social
democracy” and the benefits of living in
“a relatively egalitarian country.”
The decision to continue war in the
face of obvious defeat – sometimes
even beyond defeat – is a compulsion
that once enjoyed the name of heroism,
at least in the mythic realm. Michael
Geyer, a military historian who is all
too familiar with the carnage inflicted
by Germany during two world wars,
terms it “catastrophic nationalism.” The
professor at the University of Chicago
and current DaimlerChrysler Fellow is
writing a book on the syndrome that
draws explicitly on Germany’s bloody
example. Examples of military-political
decision making and the action and
reactions of ordinary Germans will
be interspersed with an ambitious
cultural and intellectual exploration of
various interlocking phenomena: the
culture of defeat, the quest for salvation,
fear of destruction (and the parallel
appeal of self-destruction), and the rich
millenarian traditions that this tapped.
Perhaps most provocatively, Geyer is
comparing Germany and France, where
he sees in the French Revolution and
the Terror a similarly “potent linkage
of self-determination, self-defense, and
virtuous citizenship.”
For the past six decades, Germans have
been engaged in the slow and painful
processes of Geschichtsaufarbeitung and
Vergangenheitsbewältigung – coming
to terms with the Nazi past. Historian
Hope Harrison will devote her next book
to more recent efforts in the unified
Germany to deal with the twentieth
century’s other German extremist,
authoritarian regime: the East German
Socialist Unity Party. The George H.W.
Bush Fellow and assistant professor
at George Washington University is
conducting interviews and examining
two sets of recent records: the 1991–
2002 “Wall Trials,” connected to the
period, how they saw themselves, and
how their upward mobility fit into that
of the middle class as a whole. From 1848
to 1878, moreover, Prussian judges were
often fiercely independent and active in
liberal politics. Ledford heads the Max
Kade Center for German Studies at Case
Western Reserve University in Cleveland,
where he is an associate professor of
history and law.
Elizabeth McCracken’s novels and short
stories have been published in eleven
countries, and though her settings are
decidedly American – obscure suburbs
and small cities like Des Moines, Iowa –
the characters who inhabit them contain
continents, both figuratively and literally
(they are often immigrants). This
spring as Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow,
McCracken is at work on Marvellous, a
Miriam Hansen, professor of humanities,
English, and film studies at the
University of Chicago, is co-editor of
the journal New German Critique, which
effected a small revolution in German
studies when she and Andreas Huyssen
founded it in 1984. Hansen, the author
of a groundbreaking study of American
silent film Babel and Babylon, is devoting
her Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellowship
to completing a book on cinema, mass
culture, and modernity among three
thinkers of the “other Frankfurt School”:
Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin,
and Theodor W. Adorno. Despite
their manifold differences, all three
critical theorists saw cinema as “key to
understanding modernity and mass
society.” Hansen laments the “persistent
and notorious” misrepresentation of
the Frankfurt School within American
and British film studies (due, in part, to
mistranslation), which tends to telescope
all of Critical Theory into a handful
of the late Adorno’s most pessimistic
statements on the “culture industry.”
She is in a unique position to remedy
the situation, having studied under
Jürgen Habermas, Alexander Kluge,
and Adorno himself at the University of
Frankfurt.
infamous shootings by GDR border
guards, and the extensive volumes
issued by two parliamentary inquiries
(1992–94 and 1995–1998) devoted,
respectively, to getting GDR history right
and to overcoming the consequences
of that history. Harrison has set out to
test the quality and historical accuracy
of the documents and to examine their
sometimes divergent conclusions.
Legal historian Kenneth Ledford,
as inaugural John Kluge Fellow, is
completing his major social and legal
history of the Prussian judiciary,
1848 to 1914. Ledford points out
that the German judiciary still has a
“reactionary reputation” (doubly strong
in Prussia), not just for its oft-cited Nazi
complicity but also for the more recent
“spectacularly conservative rulings”
made from the bench in the Federal
Republic. Ledford’s project looks
back to the nineteenth century not in
order to identify the Sonderweg along
which Germany marched toward Nazi
dictatorship but simply to show “judges
as specific historical actors embedded
in place and calling.” He has made a
careful study of how judges were trained,
recruited, and supervised during the
short novel that deals very specifically
with “place, from the smallest level (a
bedroom, a house, a six-house street) to
the largest (a city, a state, a country at a
particular time.)” With her second novel,
Niagara Falls All Over Again, McCracken
subjected her hero, Mose Sharp, to a life
of characteristically American roving
restlessness. Mose and his vaudeville
partner travel from hardscrabble
Midwestern depression-era beginnings
through a period of Laurel& Hardylike Hollywood success, followed by
the inevitable downward slide into
television. The book earned McCracken
a pen/Winship award.
Short films by Reynold Reynolds have
been shown at prestigious festivals from
Sundance to Rotterdam, from the New
York Underground Film Festival to the
Cuban biennial. But it is the challenge
of presenting his pieces as museum
installations (at places like the Tate
Modern in London) that most intrigues
this spring’s Guna S. Mundheim
Fellow. How do the expectations of an
art audience differ from those of a film
audience? In art venues his work takes
on different, hypnotic qualities – with
sound, special effects, and even narrative
content occupying a new plane. Three
short films Reynolds made with Patrick
Jolley – “Burn” (2002), “The Drowning
Room” (2000), and “Seven Days Til
Sunday” (1998) – take on the classic
elements of fire, water, and air,
respectively. Though Reynolds insists
that this is a coincidence, he and Jolley
have embarked on a fourth project,
which adds the element of earth to the
quartet. “Soil,” a film about relentless
decomposition, is one of several film
projects occupying the artist this spring.
David Warsh, who is the editor of
EconomicPrincipals.com and this spring’s
JP Morgan Fellow, has made a career of
reporting on the impact of university
economics on historical awareness
and public policy. His weekly column,
which appeared in the business section
of the Boston Globe for more than 18
years, moved on-line in March 2002. EP
continues to explore “the connections
between university economics and the
rest of the world” but has taken on more
“peripatetic” dimensions as well.
Warsh’s self-styled experiment
in independent online economic
journalism has come to include
commentaries on current topics ranging
from election year machinations in the
homeland to terrorism abroad, and
this spring Warsh is looking closely at
how economic ideas are being shaped
in Europe’s universities and institutes.
The website is powered by Warsh’s
belief that “fellow citizens should know
more about where economic ideas come
from, and what happens to them after
they leave home” – as well as by grants
from the Sabre Foundation and private
individuals.
uu
The Berlin Journal
33
Fellow Profile: Xu Bing
Don’t Vacuum this Room
When artist Xu Bing left China for
the US in 1990, in the wake of the
Tiananmen Square massacre, he
brought with him a mangled bicycle
salvaged from the day the tanks rolled
in. Over a decade later, when disaster
struck his new home town on September
11, 2001, he would engage in another
salvage operation, this time of dust
from the wreckage of the World Trade
Center. The dust now lies in a fine layer
across the parquet floors of a museum in
Cardiff, Wales, marking out the words
of a Buddhist koan: “As there is nothing
from the first/ where does the dust
itself collect?” This fragile installation,
together with his entire oeuvre, has just
won Xu Bing the first Artes Mundi Prize,
a $70,000 award for contemporary art.
The line of Xu Bing’s career has been a
curling, agitated brushstroke stretching
from the imposing Chinese tradition
of dissident scholar-painters (like
the exiled early-Qing-dynasty master
Bada Shanren) to more recent populist
credos such as “art for the people.”
From a decidedly Chinese context, he
has transposed his fascination with the
substance and the trappings of literacy,
his sense of humor, and his ability to
needle an audience to the top of the
international art scene.
“Throughout my life,” Xu has written,
“I have always felt that I am incapable of
34
entering culture, and at the same time
I am unable to escape it.” In fact, his
word-based work has entered new cultures with impressive ease. Shown all
over Europe, North America, and Asia,
Xu Bing’s pieces are as likely to incorporate advanced computer software as to
make use of stone rubbings, banners,
and ancient bookbinding methods – and
as likely to poke fun at Western modes
of art installation and performance as it
is to turn the Chinese calligraphic tradition on its head.
Xu, born 1955, is the child of profoundly literate parents – and of Mao’s
wrenching cultural reforms. No sooner
had he memorized the first of thousands
of classical Chinese characters than a
drastically simplified set of characters
was introduced. During the Cultural
Revolution, his historian father and
librarian mother were pilloried as “reactionaries” just as Xu himself was being
packed off to the countryside for a program of “rustication.” He returned to
Beijing much influenced by his time as a
laborer, becoming first a model student
and then a prized teacher at Beijing’s
Central Academy of Fine Art. There was
a period in which he worked in the propaganda factories, painting giant posters. Throughout the 1980s he was a
favorite of the Chinese art establishment, but gradually, as his work began
to take an increasingly experimental
direction, the favor turned to irritation.
Xu spent painstaking months preparing his first major conceptual work,
“A Book from the Sky,” which was first
exhibited in Beijing in October 1988 –
just months before the student protests
began in Tiananmen Square. He devised
an elaborate system of some four thousand unintelligible “characters,” carving each fake word onto a wood block
and assembling them into over five hundred hand-printed books and scrolls.
His patience in preparing the volumes
matched his mischievous delight in the
element of surprise – the moment when
viewers would realize that the distinguished looking texts surrounding them
are meaningless. The work caused a sensation – which morphed into uproar
after the June 1989 crackdown. His old
teachers denounced it as impenetrable,
inaccessible, “bourgeois liberal.” When
a leading cultural Mandarin disparagingly compared it to “ghosts pounding
the wall,” Xu promptly left Beijing for
north China and, with the help of a team
of other “ghosts,” made a full-scale rubbing of the Great Wall itself. The result,
“Ghosts Pounding the Wall,” is one of
his most powerful works. Soon after its
completion he left for the US.
Since leaving China, Xu’s work has
taken on even more variety: In 1994, he
transformed a Beijing art gallery into a
pigpen – literally – where a male and a
female pig, both carefully painted with
characters from his pseudo pictogrammar, frolicked un-self-consciously before
a discomfited audience. In 1995, he
placed silk moths onto the pages of large
blank books, watching the eggs and larvae form the shifting lines of an unreadable, enigmatic text – before being
effaced in a web of spun silk.
Xu continues to play with notions of
art’s accessibility, particularly through
his “Square Word Calligraphy” system,
developed to combine Western words
with Chinese calligraphic techniques.
The project, which often takes the form
of interactive classroom installations,
has built a popular bridge to Western
audiences, who learn some of the tenets
of the Chinese art of writing – correct
posture, creative stroke, and attentiveness to spiritual energy – by taking up
the brush themselves.
The breadth of Xu Bing’s work will
be on view from May 27 through
August 1 in a special exhibition at the
Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst in
Berlin-Dahlem, as well as in a companion catalogue, co-published by
the American Academy, the Staatliche
Museen zu Berlin, and the Deutsche
Gesellschaft für Ostasiatische Kunst. o
On the WATERFRONT
In Berlin, a Showcase of
American Talent Marks
an Anniversary
Lie’ by Celan. I needed to imagine
Benn where he was in the 1920s.”
For journalists like Richard
Cohen, a columnist for The
Washington Post, time at the
Academy provided new sources of information. “I thought it
would be good to get my head out
Five Years at the Hans Arnhold Center
of Washington and look at America
from abroad,” he said.
BERLIN - Alvin Youngblood Hart
But it has also become a place for
Mr. Cohen made his mark on
sidled up to the microphone in
Germans and Americans to interact Berlin in October when he gave
black leather pants and a plaid
and talk with, and sometimes yell
his controversial speech “America,
shirt, dreadlocks tumbling out of
at, one another.
the Misunderstood,” a lecture
his leather cap. “The whole world
The informal design of the place on American values and the reahas gone mad, especially recently,” “is an imminent form of critique of sons for the Iraq war. “The reacsaid Mr. Hart, the blues guitarist
the insularity of some German insti- tion was much more hostile from
and 2003 Grammy Award nominee. tutions,” said director Gary Smith. the Americans in the audience than
Then he leaned back and used his
“I don’t think the Academy should
the Germans,” he said. “It made me
guitar to make the same point.
be an academic monastery.”
recapitulate my thinking.”
Up front, a row of his colleagues
So the fellows, chosen from
Fellows can eat almost every
from the American Academy in
about two hundred applicants,
meal together if they choose, and
Berlin, where he was staying for a
spend their days writing, travelthere are optional programs set up
month as a Distinguished Visitor,
ing, visiting exhibitions, speaking
by the Academy, like visits to the
clapped and cheered. On this paror sometimes just exploring Berlin
Bundestag and film screenings.
ticular night in November, Mr. Hart in the name of the creative proSvetlana Boym, a professor of
was king of the stage in the darkcess. But important work gets done: Slavic literature at Harvard and a
ened movie theater on the west side Jeffrey Eugenides, for example,
current fellow said that the group
of Berlin. But each of the 11 fellows wrote part of his novel Middlesex,
has become close. “We have intelwould have the chance to walk a
which won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize,
lectual relations and arguments
red carpet of their choosing during during his fellowship year, and
with specific people.” As she works
their stay.
Ward Just set a recent novel, The
on a book about the tensions
To be an American Academy fel- Weather in Berlin (2002), in an acad- among public, philosophical, and
low means being given a platform
emy suspiciously like this one,
artistic freedoms, her interactions
for your work by night and an oasis where he was also a fellow.
with German colleagues have also
to conduct your research by day.
Pierre Joris, a Belgian-born poet, helped illuminate the relationship
The American Academy, which
has long studied post-World War II between art and politics, she said.
just celebrated its fifth anniverwriters who wrote in German, but
The German interior minister,
sary, held 118 cultural and politihe had never been to Berlin. The
Otto Schily, saw the Academy’s influcal events last year. It is a tempocity became important for him as
ence as reaching beyond the elite of
rary home for American scholars,
he began to translate the works of
Berlin. “When one views those who
journalists, economists, and artists writers like Gottfried Benn and
go to the American Academy as mulwho, supported by sizable stipends, Paul Celan.
tipliers in their communities, then
spend a month to a year in a beau“I walked along Berlin’s Landwehr- the Academy has changed how those
tiful villa on the Wannsee, a lake
kanal the other day,” he said. “I need- in Berlin view America,” Mr. Schily
just outside the German capital.
ed to walk the path of the poem ‘You said in an interview.
Certainly it provided a forum
for heated debates during tensions
between Germany and the US over
the Iraq war. At the height of these
disagreements, Mr. Schily debated Richard C. Holbrooke, who was
American ambassador to Germany
in the early 1990s and later ambassador to the United Nations, and
was instrumental in establishing
the Academy.
“The farsightedness of setting up
the Academy when there is such a
high level of tension and anger in
the German-American relationship
cannot be underestimated,” said
John Kornblum, another former
American ambassador to Germany
and now the chairman of Lazard
& Company GmbH, Germany, an
investment bank. “It has the broadest mixture of people who attend
its events of any transatlantic center here.”
The Aspen Institute Berlin,
which is often mentioned in
the same conversations as the
American Academy, focuses more
on politics and foreign policy.
It describes itself as “a transatlantic marketplace of ideas” and is
run by a moderately conservative
American, Jeffrey Gedmin, who has
been active in the German debate
over Bush administration policies.
The American Academy was
created by Mr. Holbrooke, who
enlisted the support of Henry A.
Kissinger, the former secretary of
state, and Richard von Weizsäcker,
the former German president. As
the American military left Berlin in
September 1994, they announced
plans to establish it. “There was a
need to create some institution that
symbolized the spirit of the new era
Lukas Foss Immerses Himself in Berlin’s Musical Life
The Return of the Native
Lukas Foss wrote an opera about a little devil named Griffelkin and gave
a head start to America’s opera-loving children with The Jumping Frog of
Calaveras County. He has a great love
of Baroque music and allows its formal models to surface over and over
in his work. But he was also a serialist, a minimalist, and a neo-romanticist: “I don’t change my style, just
my techniques and means of expression,” Lukas Foss says. This week
36
the 81-year-old composer, one of
Americans oldest and most influential, is a Distinguished Visitor at the
American Academy.
For the Berlin-born Foss, this is
a return. “I have only a few memories of old Berlin, Tiergarten in particular.” He and his Jewish family had to emigrate in 1933; at age
15 the child prodigy found himself at the famous Curtis Institute of
Music in Philadelphia. He studied
conducting with Serge Koussevitzky
at Tanglewood and composition with
Paul Hindemith. In 1953, he took
over Arnold Schönberg’s composition class at UCLA. He remained
there for ten years but later lived primarily in New York and Boston: “I
still teach there every Monday,” Foss
says, “that’s why I have so little time
to organize my papers and notes.”
And considering his work-intensive
life, these papers and notes have
become many indeed.
As the longtime director of the
Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Buffalo
Philharmonic, and the Milwaukee
Symphony, Foss has upheld both
the classical tradition and modernism. He also performs as a pianist
and develops children’s programs,
regarding himself as a spokesman
for his art.
This time he came to Berlin
with his piece “Tashi,” for clarinet,
based on intellectual rather than
military ties,” Mr. Kissinger said in
an interview.
Mr. Holbrooke said, “Our mission is to keep alive the special relationship between Americans and
the people of Berlin.” The Academy,
he said, was designed to serve as a
continuing bridge outside government channels. “It has never proved
its value more than during this time
of tensions in the official relationship, when it is serving as a bridge
between the two countries,” he said.
With an operating budget of $2.7
million for 2004, the Academy has
attracted about eighty private and
corporate donors. But the largest are
the descendants of Hans Arnhold, a
wealthy banker who owned the villa
in 1921 and was forced to leave when
the Nazis came to power. Arnhold’s
relatives, especially his daughter,
Anna-Maria Kellen, and her husband, Stephen Kellen, donated the
money to renovate the villa and start
the Academy. The result has been an
institution that is more than just a
policy forum.
“This involves a friendship that
stands independently, that doesn’t
simply revolve around whether a
pre-emptive strike is the right security policy,” Mr. Weizsäcker said
in an interview. “The American
Academy stands for the values of the
Enlightenment, for the American
Constitution that provides a structure for checks and balances, and for
a state under the rule of law.” o
By Sarah Means Lohmann
From The New York Times
December 25, 2003
string quartet, and orchestra,
which was played at the Academy
by the Scharoun Ensemble.
While he is in Berlin, Foss
wants to immerse himself deeply
in the city’s musical life. His tight
schedule includes a film about
the tenor Joseph Schmidt, Alcina
at the Komische Oper, and a premiere of a work by composer Frank
Michael Beyer.o
By Manuel Brug
From the Berliner Morgenpost
March 13, 2004
Translated by Brian Currid
23.04.2004
8:42 Uhr
Alvin Youngblood Hart performs in Berlin.
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XU BING: AS THERE IS NOTHING FROM THE FIRST I WHERE DOES THE DUST ITSELF COLLECT ?
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Two Failed Walls
By David Warsh
berlin – There was the usual dinner here before Hope M. Harrison’s
lecture at the American Academy
in Berlin about the origins of the
Berlin Wall in 1961. Chef Reinold
Kegel prepared a witty meal: first,
Rostock fish stew with mussels;
then, “Broiler,” baked chicken on a
bed of rice and peas with lecso relish, both typical East German dishes; and finally, a “Divided Dessert.”
That turned out to be a meager
but succulent slice of pineapple,
a reminder of trade with Cuba,
topped with whipped cream
(there were plenty of cows in East
Germany) separated, however, by a
long thin cookie wafer (decorated,
in turn, with delicate frosting on
one side to evoke the painting of the
wall) from a rich chocolate mousse
studded with pieces of banana.
This banana business is a kind of
running joke among Berliners. Even
before the wall went up, film director Billy Wilder ridiculed ubiquitous shortages in the East with a
scene in his neglected classic One
Two Three: a Potemkin bar in which
an East German entertainer yodels
a German version of “Yes, We Have
No Bananas,” chronicling a long list
of shortages. When the Wall came
down, the West German government handed out bananas to the
throngs of celebrating Ossies in
Potsdamer Platz.
Harrison’s after-dinner talk was
fascinating. Then it paid an unexpected dividend the next day.
Harrison is an assistant professor of history and international affairs at George Washington
University and author of the newlypublished Driving the Soviets Up the
Wall: Soviet-East German Relations
1953-1961. She served as director
the Soviets insisted remain communist at the end of World War II. So
the city itself was divided into four
sectors administered by the wartime
allies – American, British, French
for European and Eurasian Affairs
and Soviet – its western sectors conat the National Security Council in
nected to West Germany by road,
2000–01.
rail, and flight paths along three
More to the point, Harrison is of potentially fragile rights of way.
the generation for whom the cold
Thereafter Berlin remained a conwar was not a real-time issue of constant source of tension between the
science but an accomplished fact.
superpowers: the scene of a famous
She was born in 1963.
blockade and airlift in 1948 – 49,
As a graduate student, she
of a short-lived rebellion crushed
flew into Berlin on November 10,
by Soviet tanks in 1953, of a more
1989 – the morning after the Wall
or less constant hemorrhage of
came down and spent the next
talented workers to the West. By
ten days witnessing the euphoria
1961 something like 10 percent of
that ensued. She spent 1991–92 in
the East German population had
Moscow and Berlin during the gold- migrated through the city to West
en age of archival research, when
Germany.
almost everything in the Soviet
As Harrison’s book shows, the
records was open to inspection.
East German government of Walter
(Many of those filing cabinets since Ulbricht pushed the Soviets to let
have been locked up again.)
them do something to staunch the
And the response to her book has flow. Behind the scenes, the argubeen enthusiastic: “A truly distinment was relatively simple: cut the
guished example of new cold war
city off from the West and take it
scholarship,” according to John
over altogether, or build a wall.
Lewis Gaddis of Yale University,
The Soviets were reluctant
who is among the leading historito challenge the Americans to a
ans of the period. “As a case study
European war, especially after John
of how a study of how a small power F. Kennedy was elected president
can manipulate a superpower, it is
in November 1960. But at the same
sure to become a classic.”
time, they understood Ulbricht’s
Among the current generaproblem.
tion of Americans, and for many
So in early 1961, the Soviets
Europeans, Berlin’s experience is
upped the ante in a bluffing game.
already fading, its story something Soviet Communist party chairthat was important once but now is man Nikita Khrushchev threatlittle more than a half-remembered ened to sign a treaty with the East
fact from a high school history book Germans that would give the small– a little like the Danzig Corridor of er nation the right to close Western
the 1930s.
access to Berlin. Kennedy then met
Berlin’s odd status at the cenKhrushchev in June 1961 at a sumter of the cold war arose at the end
mit conference in Vienna and
of World War II – a war in which
gave the Soviet leader two strong
Germany had wounded Russia
messages.
gravely, and which the Soviet Union
The US would tolerate no interhad done more than its share to
ference with West Berlin. But almost
win. The historic capital was located anything else was okay. Khrushchev
deep inside the half of Germany that signaled that the USSR would sign
the treaty. It would be up to the US
to decide whether that meant war.
Kennedy famously replied: “Then,
Mr. Chairman, there will be war.
It will be a cold winter.”
Instead, the Wall went up in
August. And for the next 28 years,
the Russians kept the road open to
Berlin, until 1989, at which point
the entire Soviet-dominated system
collapsed.
Talking all this over with a friend
the next day, I was startled when
he made a swift connection between
East German party boss Ulbricht
and long-time South Vietnamese
president Nguyen Van Thieu. His
point was the same as Harrison’s:
that often allies are difficult to control.
But Ulbricht had been the villain of Harrison’s story. It took a little while before I realized that my
friend was simply reasoning backward by analogy. In the point he
was making, the US was to South
Vietnam as the Soviet Union had
been to East Germany – a superpower being led around by the nose by a
repressive client-state.
But then Vietnam was supposed
to have been just the other way
around, at least in the view of the
original decision-maker, John F.
Kennedy, and, in truth, even after
all these years, in mine. (Ngo Dinh
Diem was running South Vietnam
in those days. Kennedy soon authorized a coup which led to Diem’s
assassination.)
In both cases, communists were
thought to be testing American willingness to back a client state. In
both cases, Washington was convinced that its credibility in a global struggle was at stake. The domino
theory was invoked.
Vietnam even had a wall – the
“McNamara Wall.” The country had
been partitioned north and south
in 1956 along the 17th parallel – the
“Demilitarized Zone” as it became
known. But North Vietnamese
materiel and troops continued to
move the south. Announced in 1967,
the McNamara Wall was supposed
to halt the southbound traffic. It
would consist of electronic sensors and observation posts, extending deep into Laos and backed by all
manner of military force.
It didn’t work. It took another eight years and altogether nearly two million lives, but the North
Vietnamese finally entered Saigon
in 1975. The last Americans fled
the country they had set out to protect. Nguyen Van Thieu moved to
Massachusetts and much of the rest
of his government moved to Hawaii
and California.
What I learned from Harrison
was that Germany differed from
Vietnam – crucially – in the
degree of great power involvement. Kennedy could bargain with
Kruschchev over the fate of West
Berlin. But the US could threaten no
one over Hanoi’s conduct of the war
– except Ho Chi Minh himself. The
failure to understand this cost several million lives.
What I had learned from the conversation with my friend is that
interpretations still differ widely as
to what had happened in Vietnam in
the past fifty years – in Washington,
in the world.
The history of Berlin is, indeed,
history. But, at least for the generation that took sides over it, the story
of Vietnam is anything but settled.
In fact, thanks to the sheer numbers
of the baby boom voters who furiously debated the issues when they
were young, it is once again a divisive issue in American politics. All
the more reason, therefore, to pay
attention to the scholars.o
Warsh is J.P.Morgan Fellow in
Economic Policy this spring.
www.economicprincipals.com
February 22, 2004
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38
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The Poisoned Memory
Self Destruction and German Defeat, 1918 and 1945
By Michael Geyer
© Leni Riefenstahl
All nationalism calls
upon nations to fight
war beyond defeat, to
cast aside self-preservation and to continue
fighting war to collective death. This deadly
imperative may appear
outlandish, something
reserved for extremists. But in German history it is rather too close
for comfort. This essay
(part of a larger bookin-progress on the subject) will explore what
this catastrophic nationalism meant in the context of World War II
and how and why it was
capable of holding an
entire nation in its grip.
While I focus here on a
single nation, Germany,
it should be evident
that the call for collective death in the defense
of the nation is a global
calamity.
40
Death Tolls
For most Germans and Americans today, the notion
of “fighting to death” seems pure hyperbole. It is difficult to imagine that “fighting to death” or “war to
the point of no return” could and did actually happen on a mass scale. The statistics suggest otherwise. The highest German death-tolls in the World
War II occurred late in the war, distinctly after Allied
victory and German defeat were assured. World
War II was at its most lethal not in 1942–43, that
is Stalingrad, but from the summer of 1944 into
April 1945. Throughout that period, German military casualties never fell below 300,000 per month.
January and February 1945 were the deadliest
months of the war – among the deadliest months of
the entire twentieth century, with German military
and civilian casualties hovering somewhere around
500,000 per month. Overall, more German soldiers
were killed in action between July 20, 1944 (the date
of the failed coup against Hitler) and May 8, 1945
(unconditional surrender) than in the entire previous five years of war between 1939 and 1944. And
during the last year of the war, the civilian casualties approximated those of the soldiers, if indeed
they did not surpass them. This is the true extent of
the “destruction on a scale without historical precedent,” which writers like W.G. Sebald have come to
speak of with quite an extraordinary effect on public
consciousness.
At the same time, Germans fought ferociously throughout the last year and the last months of
the war. Facing inexorable defeat, they fought to
the point of self-destruction and lashed out at their
enemies with extraordinary fury. Casualties among
the Third Reich’s opponents reached exorbitant
heights. While American casualties in the European
theater were always higher than in the Pacific, the
American forces fought some of their deadliest battles between November 1944 and February 1945 on
the entire western front and even on the southern
front in Italy. But American casualties were dwarfed
by the exorbitant losses the Red Army suffered in its
advance across the Oder and into Berlin, as well as
in its sweep through Southeastern Europe.
Simultaneously, German security forces decimated their ideological enemies in a vast wave of
mass murders across the shrinking space of occupied Europe. Violence against civilians found its cataclysmic expression both in combined Wehrmacht
and SS sweeps against real and imagined partisans
as well as in the systematic destruction of Eastern
European cities like Warsaw and Budapest. Within
the ambit of these “killing frenzies,” the deathmarches of concentration and death camp inmates
stand out as the most horrendous examples of murder. Even when the death factories were closed in
late 1944 on order of Heinrich Himmler, the killing
and the dying continued unabated. The annihilation of the victims of the Third Reich did not come
to an end until Germany had surrendered and was
occupied.
In short, World War II reached its lethal zenith
after the outcome of war, victory and defeat, were
all but certain. In a most immediate and literal
sense, then, annihilation and self-destruction intertwined during the last phase of the war. This sad
progression of mass death hinged on what appeared
to Allied combatants to be an unflagging German
spirit of war. Much has since been done to differentiate this image. There was no romantic desire
for death, no Götterdämmerung, but the fact is that
Germans soldiered on in the midst of a cataclysm
of destruction. Had the German front – any of the
fronts – collapsed, had German morale buckled, had
there been a more sustained resistance, there still
would have been the legacy of genocidal war and of
the Holocaust to contend with. However, because
Germans fought in the face of their own destruction, Europe turned into a vast zone of death with
Germans in the role of vicious torturers and murderers, tenacious fighters, and hapless victims.
Catastrophic Nationalism
The seeds for the seemingly unending pursuit of war
in World War II were sown in World War I. In the
face of defeat, the nationalist right found a language
of epic outrage that focused on the notion of an
Endkampf – a final battle. This was the rhetoric, for
example, of the Military Supreme Command’s call
for a popular uprising in late October 1918: “Will
the German people fight for their honor not just
with words, but fight to the last man, and therefore
guarantee the possibility of rebirth (Wiedererstehen),
or will it be pushed into capitulation and therefore
to destruction before a last and extreme exertion?”1
Though it failed as a call for action, the exhortation expressed a widely held sentiment regarding what was proper and virtuous for a nation.
Walter Rathenau had made a similar argument in
Heilsversprechen. The German people would be freed
from moral collapse, society reinstituted, fear and
loathing overcome, but only when Germans were
ready to die and to sacrifice themselves.
This self-sacrificial pursuit of an Endkampf in
the wake of World War I’s humiliations was inextricably tied to the relentless eradication of any
and all who were or were perceived to oppose it.
The November Revolution of 1918, as the signal of
the nation’s unwillingness to continue war, only
cemented a suspicion that had much deeper roots;
if Germans were unwilling to fight, then wicked
and evil forces – freemasons, Jews, or, for that matter, Catholics, Socialists, pro-Republicans – were
to blame. These conspiratorial forces could prevail
only because of the nation’s disunity and moral corruption which they had fomented, so the argument
went. The body politic had to be purified. Endkampf
and an exclusivist nationalism found its most potent
enemy in the figure of the Jew.
It could be argued at length that this idea of
a sacrificial compact drew on an older lineage of
thought about sacrifice and the nation in Germany,
a profoundly Protestant one, which built on the
image of the German nation as the Chosen People,
the New Israel, replacing and eliminating the old.
In this sense, German nationalism, especially from
Fichte on, has been eliminationist and anti-Semitic.
This tendency was always linked to a second, equally Biblical strand that posited the nation’s willingness to sacrifice (the self in the form of one’s offspring) as the quintessential sacrificial compact
More German soldiers were killed in
action between July 20, 1944 and May
8, 1945 than in the entire previous five
years of war between 1939 and 1944.
early October, as had Konrad Haussmann, the liberal Deputy from Württemberg. Max Weber even
echoed it in 1919 when he called for a guerilla war
resisting the Versailles Treaty. But it was the nationalist right that made a war of resistance into a moral
panacea. Adolf Hitler used it as a rhetorical set piece
over and over again when non-violent resistance
against the French occupation of Ruhr area was
foiled in 1923. The following passage of a speech is
attributed to him:
The Ruhr should have become the German
Moscow! We would have had to demonstrate
that the German people of 1923 are no longer
the people of 1918!… [T]he German people is no
longer ready to bow under the yoke! And if even
worse agony came upon us! Come, Agony! The
people of dishonor and shame is once again a
people of heroes! Behind the burning Ruhr such
a people would have organized their resistance
come life or death…. Now a new hour begins.
Furnace upon furnace; bridge upon bridge
blown up! Germany is awakening!2
Hitler’s rhetoric and that of his ilk offered a promise
of liberation in the most emphatic sense. It weighed
liberation against the notion of social death through
oppression and enslavement – Knechtschaft. This
idea of war was sacrificial rather than instrumental. Importantly, it offered the promise of salvation –
(with God) ensuring its unity against moral corruption (the Golden Calf ). Emblematic of this self-sacrifice was the 1631 sack of Magdeburg during the
Thirty Years War, which lived on in memory as cataclysm, Weltuntergang; the rape and slaughter of the
pure by the wicked; and the site of virtuous resistance in defeat. Magdeburg fought to the point of
self-destruction and, in doing so, redeemed the
Protestant German nation to come.
But this does not fully capture the prevailing
sentiment. Magdeburg was not the only lieu de
memoire to consider. Bible images mixed with
Germanic myth. The richness of catastrophic
imagination, of Weltuntergang and Weltgericht, is
astounding. The idea of an Endkampf in 1918 built
on and renewed diverse tradition. What matters
is the ready availability of this material, which was
very much part of the German mainstream – not the
work of cranks.
Poisoning the Future
How does catastrophic nationalism help us understand Nazi war and genocide? Does it explain the catastrophic death-tolls at the end of World War II? The
answer is both decidedly “yes” and decidedly “no.”
Nazi and military elites deliberately entered
into the final phase of the war knowing full well that
The Berlin Journal
41
the tide had shifted irrevocably against them. As historians acknowledge, German political and military
leadership was keenly aware of the worsening strategic situation and of impending defeat as early as
1942. Following others who have studied the situation in detail, I suggest that October 1942 be taken
as a turning point. It was then that a series of stra-
self-destruction was not the end, but the beginning
of remembrance. The Third Reich had lost the war,
but in its active pursuit of catastrophe, the Nazi
leadership was confident that it would capture the
future.
Fifty years after World War II, this future has
not arrived. Instead, with the cultural revolution
The 1631 sack of Magdeburg lived on
in memory as the rape and slaughter of
the pure by the wicked and the site of
virtuous resistance in defeat. By fighting to the point of self-destruction,
Magdeburg redeemed the Protestant
German nation.
tegic assessments strongly suggested that, after the
failure of the summer offensive, Germany was on
the strategic defensive.
This is the same period that saw the mobilization of the machinery of Total War. It also coincided with the Propaganda Ministry’s first major
campaign, officially in preparation for the 1942
Volkstrauertag (People’s Day of Mourning). Calling
upon the Germans to imitate their “heroic dead”
– a central theme from that point onward – Josef
Goebbels launched the campaign with a series
of articles that stand out even in a world already
engrossed in a cult of the dead:
Our consolation in this hour of remembrance
is our unalterable faith that one day the shining hour of victory will rise from the graves of
our dead, our noble fallen. This victory will be
crowned with the miraculous blessing of the
sacrifice of these men and women, for whom we
grieve today.... The heart of the dead ... continues to beat, especially in the youth of Germany,
who cannot wait to avenge the great sacrifice
of your loved ones with an eye for an eye and
a tooth for a tooth. The hour of revenge has
begun! We must see inscribed over the caskets
of our fallen the old call to action: Germany
must live – even if we must die.3
The grim intent of this “sacrifice” was spelled out
in Hitler’s testament: “Centuries will pass, but out
of the ruins of our towns and of our art the hatred
will be renewed against the people who in the last
instance are responsible and whom we can thank for
all of this: international Jewry and its auxiliaries.”4
This was a return to the language of 1923.
Used thus in 1942–43, it initiated a deliberate politics of the funeral pyre, aimed not only at snatching immortality from the throes of defeat through
a heroic gesture but at inciting the mobilization
of generations to come. The Nazis sought to make
the nation self-destruct so that future generations
would have no choice but to revenge the dead.
From this point onward, Goebbels systematically sounded the note of collective death as a beacon for future revenge. The logic of Endkampf after
1942 was as simple as it was poisonous: to die in war
as a German soldier or civilian meant to be remembered; to be remembered entailed being revenged;
42
of the late 1950s and 1960s, most Germans chose
to disavow their dead. The question that remains
is what will happen, when they start to remember? The first step toward finding an answer is to
acknowledge how deeply poisoned this memory of
the dead was and continues to be.
There is no indication that the majority of the
soldiers or, for that matter, civilians, embraced the
Nazi cult of the dead. Rather, the persistence and
intensity (one might even speak of a certain revival) of religious rituals of mourning is striking. More
generally, the distance of the German people to
far as the Jewish question is concerned, we are
so distinctly committed that there is no escape
for us. And that is good. A movement and a
people that have burnt the bridges behind itself
will fight much more relentlessly than those
who still have a chance for a retreat.
While the myth-history of Endkampf cannot explain
the Holocaust, the Holocaust goes a long way
toward explaining the Endkampf that the involuntary community of Germans fought in spite of themselves. Goebbels’s comment was mirrored in propaganda. The mushrooming fantasies about revenge
and the mushrooming propaganda that generated
or seconded these fantasies ahead of the fact were
pervasive. A nation that had committed atrocities
and genocide was not likely to sue for peace – and
it did not.
There has been much debate among historians
regarding the question of the effect of Nazi ideology,
and the entire matter should be reassessed.
Nazi mobilization most successfully addressed
the young and the youngest. Generations of men
and women rediscovered themselves through the
mobilization of myth, innovative propaganda initiatives, and radicalized Nazi ideology. Here was
a new vanguard pushing and cajoling a reluctant
majority into action: battle-hardened junior officers, middle management, factory foremen, the
women who, with awe-inspiring intensity, maintained the infrastructure of bureaucracy and everyday life in bombed-out cities. They used armies of
forced labor to do the dirty and dangerous work.
It is important to recognize how and why the system worked so effectively. It worked because there
The Nazi politics of the funeral pyre
sought to make the nation self-destruct
so that future generations would have no
choice but to revenge the dead.
the Nazi regime grew as defeat approached. And
yet, without apparently believing in what they
fought for, Germans effectively continued to do the
regime’s bidding.
To attempt to answer this riddle leads into
treacherous terrain. Emotions are still raw. But it
is important at least to try to resolve the contradictions of event, experience, and memory.
The Fear of Revenge
Nazi propaganda succeeded quite spectacularly in
at least one respect. It embedded the fear of enemy
revenge into German hearts, thus creating an involuntary German community. Indeed, if I have been
referring to “the” Germans in World War II (as a collective entity), I do so for this very reason. Wars are
generally capable of creating such involuntary communities, but the Nazi leadership fostered this tendency even more deliberately. After a crucial meeting with Göring about total mobilization, on March
2, 1943, Goebbels noted in his diary with smug satisfaction:
Göring is perfectly aware of what would happen to all of us if we were to become weak in this
war. He has no illusions about it. Especially as
were always enough civilians, men and women, who
took on ever-widening responsibilities and worked
their laborers ragged – and, often enough, worked
them to death; there were soldiers and officers who,
by dint of circumstance, ideology, or sheer bravery,
relentlessly pulled small units, much as large formations forward – forward into self-destruction; and
in the midst of all this, there was the vast number of
security personnel, who out of fear, out of spite, and
out of loathing drove tens of thousands of people
into death. It was the tyranny of young virtue rather
than the convictions of the old Nazi sacks that drove
Germans into the cataclysm of the last years of war.
One must also consider the role of state terror. The sheer measure of state terror against the
German population cannot be overemphasized.
Between 1943 and 1945, the number of convictions for defeatism (Wehrkraftzersetzung) skyrocketed, and the overall number of Germans killed by
the regime – approximately 300,000 – is astonishing. Especially during the last year of the war, there
was an acute and very real fear of getting killed –
not by the enemy but by the many roving death
squads (for that is what the fliegende Feldgerichte,
the mobile court marshal units, basically were)
roaming the country.
Terror worked so effectively, however, because
it hinged on a much more generalized compulsion:
a “no-exit” situation for civilians and soldiers.
Rather than softening German morale, the ever
tighter enclosure of German space and the total
vulnerability to air attacks advanced the sense of no
escape and heightened compulsion. The leadership
often designed ingenious no-exit situations. In
bombed out cities, for example, it was often only
in factory canteens that one could find food. A
system of cleared streets leading to the factory, its
combination of compulsion and self-mobilization
that can explain why ordinary people fight and go on,
even though they may sense that they are lost.
Fatal Strategies of Survival
In the case of the Germans in World War II, the perversity of the situation becomes fully apparent when
we recognize that the prevailing survival strategies led to the worst disasters. That is to say that the
very impulse to survive and the prevailing strategies
Goebbels noted in his diary “a people that has burnt its bridges will fight
much more relentlessly than those
who still have a chance for a retreat.”
canteens, and temporary housing there, essentially
tied workers, both male and female, to work. In the
military, security cordons, staffed by the much feared
military police, were systematically set up behind
the front to catch all those who streamed back on
the retreat in order to return them to the front.
The famous elasticity of the German army, which
thrived on the interchangeability of functions, was
able to transform even cooks, drivers, and hospital
personnel into fighting cadres.
Outright state terror hinged on the institutionalization and systematization of compulsion. Terror
remained selective and often random. What was predictable was the way that soldiers and civilians were
funneled into one-way streets that led invariably
toward fighting and – given the vast superiority of the
Allies – self-destruction. In contrast to 1918, however,
Germans did work and fight. And working and fighting, they propelled themselves relentlessly forward in
a system of virtuous mobilization that tied Haltung,
a sense of self worth, to the pursuit of war-fighting
prowess and recognition to exceptional industry in
pursuit of war – and the forward propulsion drove
them into unimaginable destruction. It is only this
of survival, under the conditions set by the Nazis
on one hand and Allied war-fighting on the other,
greatly heightened the chance of getting killed. The
seemingly sensible idea that only collectively – as
family, as group, as trek, as nation – could individuals survive proved to be calamitous.
This is certainly true of the armed forces, where
comradeship dictated that soldiers stick together.
Time and again, they formed viable fighting units
that were relentlessly pushed back into the front.
And the more youthful, inexperienced, and frightened the units, the higher their inclination to clump
together. Toward the end of the war many of the soldiers were between 14 and 16 years old. The carnage
among the youngest was indescribable. Deserters
ran the risk of being shot (as in the case of a cohort
of deserting Hitler Youth near Vienna). But thrown
into battle, these inexperienced and frightened
youngsters were marked for death.
Mass flight from the East needs to be considered in this light as well. The deliberate and systematic delay and hindrance of civilian and military
officials in organizing the flight, the desperate will
to survive that led to collective flight in the middle
Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin
of winter, and the extraordinary brutality of civilian treks when caught between the lines led to the
worst German civilian carnage in the entire war. It
is often debated whether these refugees (or, for that
matter, the bombing victims) were innocent or not.
It is the wrong question to ask. Much like the teenage conscripts, they became the sacrificial victims
of an Endkampf that deliberately set out to destroy
and poison the future. And this being an ungodly
war, there was no angel who stayed the slaughtering hand.
Military history suggests that flight (in contrast
to capitulation) is the deadliest form of survival. The
mass flight from occupied and German territories in
the East not only proved this rule but highlights the
essential reality of Endkampf in 1945. This was not
the nation of heroic Nibelungs, fighting to the last
man, woman, and child, envisioned by Nazi propaganda. This was a frightened and desperate mass,
a nation that had lost any sense of the future, desperately desired not to know, and dearly wished to
believe in a fortuitous and possibly miraculous outcome of the war. It was a nation that entered the last
years of war, quite literally, with “eyes wide shut.”o
1. Hindenburg’s telephone call to Max von Baden on October
20, transmitted by the liaison, Col. Haeften. Amtliche Urkunden
zur Vorgeschichte des Waffenstillstandes 1918 (Berlin: Deutsche
Verlagsgesellschaft für Politik und Gesellschaft, 1924),
doc. 63, p. 166.
2. Adolf Hitler: Sein Leben und seine Reden, ed. Adolf-Viktor von
Koerber (Munich, 1923), pp. 77–78.
3. Jay W. Baird, To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 240.
4. Sabine Behrenbeck, Der Kult um die toten Helden:
Nationalsozialistische Mythen, Riten und Symbole 1923 bis 1945
(Vierow bei Greifswald: SH-Verlag, 1996), p. 587.
Michael Geyer is DaimlerChrysler Fellow at the Academy
this spring and Samuel N. Harper Professor of History at
the University of Chicago. He is the author, most recently, of
Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (with Konrad
Hugo Jarausch, 2003) as well as numerous articles in both
German and English on European and German history. His
scholarly interests range from military history and history
of violence to globalization and human rights.
A M P OT S DA M E R P L AT Z
Fabrizio Plessi. Traumwelt
Hans Christian Schink. Fotografien
Hugo Brehme – Fotograf
Henri Cartier-Bresson. Retrospektive
Sophie Calle
Ausstellungen 2004
27. Februar – 31. Mai 2004
24. April – 5. Juli 2004
Veranstalter: Villa Aurora e.V.
Mexiko zwischen Revolution und Romantik • 7. Mai – 21. Juni 2004
Veranstalter: Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz • Ermöglicht durch den Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin
15. Mai – 15. August 2004
Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele • Ermöglicht durch die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien
10. September – 13. Dezember 2004
Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele • Eine Ausstellung des Centre Pompidou Paris • Ermöglicht durch den Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin
Terminänderungen sind möglich • Stand: März 2004
Veranstalter: Berliner Festspiele • Gefördert vom Italienischen Außenministerium und der Italienischen Botschaft – Kulturabteilung / Istituto di Cultura
Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin • Tel. (030) 254 86-0, Fax (030) 254 86-107, www.gropiusbau.de
Verkehrsverbindungen: S-Bahn: Anhalter Bahnhof/Potsdamer Platz • U-Bahn: Potsdamer Platz • Bus: 129 Anhalter Bahnhof, 248, 341 Abgeordnetenhaus
The Berlin Journal
43
Societäta Verlag
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To
Litigation Hell in America
By Thomas Geoghegan
The collapse of unions, the withdrawal from
civic life, and the seven-fold increase in the rate
of imprisonment are just three factors that have
changed how people in America experience the rule
of law. The legal system has come to seem arbitrary,
unpredictable, and unfair. And those who are part
of it have learned to act accordingly.
and King Alfred and the Domesday Book. But even
for America, on a mass basis, this is a new type of
legal regime. For decades, from the 1930s on, we
operated under either a “contract,” or a threat of
one through union organizing. Before that, we lived,
overwhelmingly, in a rural economy, with the majority of Americans working on a farm, or as tradesmen and craftsmen and apprentices in often tiny
American “cities.” And even those who fell outThe Movement from Contract to Tort
side of farm-and-shop were in an economy that was
The British historian H.A. Maine proposes the thesis
always desperately short of labor.
that modernity is the movement from “status” to “conIn short, until unions collapsed, America did
tract.” Without being quite as grandiose, I say the big- not know “employment at will” in anything like its
gest change I have seen, though it goes almost unrecurrent, universal, and highly arbitrary form. Far
corded in legal literature, is that, with the collapse of
from being the era of King Alfred, “employment at
unions, we have moved from “contract” to “tort.”
will,” for us, is more like the Brave New World. It
For most working Americans, this may be the
means a constant turnover, on a scale known in no
biggest change in the way the law now impacts their
other country, nor at any time in our history. It is a
lives. In the 1950s and l960s, up to 35 percent of
regime that Americans experience as maddening.
workers, especially men, were covered by collecAny human being would.
tive bargaining agreements. As a matter of “conThe bite of it is softened only by the fact that so
tract,” each worker was protected, or could not be
many of these jobs aren’t worth fighting to keep.
fired except for just cause. If he were fired, his union
While there is no “contract” remedy, howevwould file a grievance, arguing that “just cause” did
er, there is now a remedy in tort. Since the collapse
not exist under the contract. If it was not resolved at
of unions, people, maddened, have flooded the fedthe grievance step, an arbitrator came in and decideral courts with “civil rights”-type claims, analoed the case in a cheap, informal procedure, often
gous to claims in tort. As labor law waned, civil
without a lawyer. The remedies? Reinstatement.
rights law waxed. Indeed, this waning and this waxBack pay. The idea was that under a contract, a
ing have a faint connection. For over thirty years,
“relationship” would continue, in some way. If only
unions have tried to pass labor law reform, to modbetween the employer and the union.
ify the Wagner Act, to let Americans join unions.
“Contract” also permeated the non-union
Freely, fairly: without being fired. While coming
world. The cultural norm, back in business then,
close, the unions, over and over, have lost, by small
was: what the hourly worker got, the middle manmargins, in the US Senate, usually as a result of a filiager got. If not a contract as such, at least a contractbuster. But perhaps as a consolation prize, Congress
based norm of fairness.
has frequently added another “new” civil right in
Now, from what I can see in my own practice as
employment. They include the Civil Rights Act of
a labor lawyer, this world of “contract” is gone. Few
1964, as amended in 1991; the Civil Rights Act of
– under 8 percent – work under any kind of labor
1971; the Age Discrimination in Employment Act;
contract. All the rest work under a rule of law known
Employee Retirement and Income Security Act; the
as “employment at will.” That is, anyone can be fired
Occupational Health and Safety Act; the Medical
for any reason, at any time. Or for no reason. Or a
and Family Leave Act; the warn Act…
bad reason, like the color of your tie. With no warnEven to me, as a labor lawyer, it is very compliing. No severance pay. Nothing. About two years
cated to determine in a given firing whether any of
ago I taught a seminar at the Humboldt University
these civil rights laws apply.
in Berlin. In our first session, as a preliminary, I
This is the world not of “labor” law but of
mentioned this “common-law” notion of “employ“employment” law, not of “contract” law but of
ment at will,” virtually as an aside. To my dismay,
“tort” law. And now, in our federal legal system, at
in each later session, I’d have to start at the beginleast on the civil side, it is the biggest single area of
ning, with “employment at will” all over again. With
law. Each year, in federal court in Chicago, we see
these young European law students, it was too hard
thousands of these cases. “Forty percent of all the filto take in. Any reason? At all? The arbitrariness,
ings here,” a magistrate judge, who settles many of
the unfairness of it, was, to a European, shocking,
them, estimated to me. But this “tort” law is quite
unnatural.
different from the old kind of “contract” law.
Whether or not it is “unnatural,” it is
First, it is not so much about conduct as it is
radically new.
about state of mind. It is no longer the issue whethIn the US, we talk of “employment at will” as a
er the employer fired the plaintiff for “just cause,”
common-law rule, as if it went back to the Saxons
whatever that might now mean in a world of
“employment at will.” What the plaintiff must do
is show that the employer acted to harm him. The
point of the case is not to limn the “objective” or
“external” but the “subjective” or “internal” – in a
sense, to peer into the human heart.
In other words, the issue is “motive.” But as
to “motive,” it is unclear, even now, at least at the
trial level, where working lawyers are, what a judge
may require us to prove. Right now, on appeal, our
firm has a case involving race. And the issue for the
appellate court is: does race have to be the factor? Or
only a factor? Surely, it is the latter.
And if it is only a factor, then what kind of factor is it? Does it have to be a controlling factor? Or
only, as the judge declared in our case, a catalytic
factor? Or, as we argue, does it only have to be a substantial factor? Then there is a huge further controversy: whether, even if so, the employer can still win
if it can prove it would have made the same decision
anyway.
Confused? So are the lawyers. After forty years
and 40,000 case opinions and repeated attempts by
the Supreme Court to clarify – which seem to last
only a short time – we are on appeal, and the case
law is, I can assure you, still unsettled.
Second, compared to the old “contract” law,
the new “tort” or civil rights law is expensive.
“Contract” (arbitration) was cheap. Easy. Now, the
fired employee has to come up with thousands –
five, ten – not to pay my legal fees, but just for costs:
the court reporter, depositions, photocopying.
Of course, by a court award, I have to obtain my
fees from the other side: soon, I have a cash claim
bigger than my client’s! I have just looked at my
“bill” for a single Title VII case. So far, to date, with
no trial, it’s nearly $180,000!
The old system? The whole proceeding may
have cost under $10,000.
Third, the cases settle, or never go to trial.
Either because the federal courts drop them through
one or another legal “trap door,” or because the parties, exhausted, finally settle. Of 100,000 civil cases
in federal court, perhaps fewer than 2 percent will
go to trial. This December the New York Times did a
front-page story on the fact that lawyers in America
no longer try cases (“US Suits Multiply, But Fewer
Ever Get To Trial”). The puzzle was: why settle on
the eve of trial when the parties have already “sunk
the costs” in the litigation? By the time of trial, the
big expenses are over. The trial itself, which may
be two or three days, is not that much more costly.
Oddly, it may be that because the parties have paid
out so much in cost, after all the deadly, destructive
phase known as discovery, they are more risk-averse
than ever.
Fourth, the new “tort” law is much more
scorched-earth style than the old “contract” law. For
one thing, in federal court, unlike arbitration,
The Berlin Journal
45
I can use the rules of discovery. And I can force you
to give up, to tell me, everything: what is in your
secret heart, not to mention in your tax returns.
It’s hard to exaggerate how big a change this is:
in a sense, everyone in the case has to strip themselves, take off their clothes – far more now than
was the case when I started out in law school. Look
at what Paula Jones’s lawyers did to Clinton, as a sitting President. It is discovery that makes the new
“American-style” tort law so bitter, so arbitrary, each
side on a rampage to swing at the other.
Over what? Intent. Motive. A “bad” state of
The bite is softened
only by the fact that
so many of these
jobs aren’t worth
fighting to keep.
mind. So that gives a legal rationale to harass, to
destroy, in a litigation that is disconnected from the
question of whether or not the employee was treated fairly.
Obviously, it is terrible for the employer, and
he or she is often right to complain; after all, the
employer probably did not engage in a “hate crime,”
or fire because of a factor like race. Or it was a mix
of several motives rather than one bad motive. But
remember that the employer got rid of the older,
cheaper system in the first place. Indeed, the more
expensive the system, the bigger the discovery
rights, the bigger the employer’s advantage. We
plaintiff lawyers learned from the management lawyers how to torture people in a deposition!
And with the new “tort” unlike the old “contract” arbitration, there is no constraint on slashand-burn. Because in arbitration, the remedy was to
reinstate, to put the employee back. If both employer and employee had to live again, together, it made
no sense to slash-and-burn.
But in the tort system, nobody is going back.
Not now. It never happens. For one thing, the litigation takes years. Go back and be fired again? So even
if the parties could hold themselves in check, there is
no longer any reason to do so.
That is the legal system we now have in postunion America; it forces us to cast legal issues in
the most subjectively explosive way, i.e., racial animus, sexism, to get around the fact we no longer can
deal objectively with just cause. Do I regret that I am
part of it? Yes. Are my clients full of hatred? Yes. It is
frightening how much power lawyers have. A lawyer,
even a very young one, may have more power than a
subcommittee of the US Senate! When a committee
holds hearings, it has but a few months to subpoena,
and the White House resists, etc. Then it’s over, with
little coughed up in the end. While in a private case,
like Paula Jones, a lawyer can subpoena, then go
back, then subpoena, then go back, and do it at leisure, for years, much as a Special Prosecutor does.
This tort-type legal system feeds on unpredictability and rage. And it has replaced a far more rational, contract-based one, which was modest, cheap,
46
and kept us, destructively, from peering into one
another’s hearts.
The Movement from the Law of Trust
to the Law of Consumer Fraud
The other big area in which most of us experience
the law is in our pensions and our healthcare. Here,
too, this legal revolution comes out of labor’s collapse.
From the New Deal up to, say, 1980, we were
creating a huge private pension system, governed
under the common law of trusts. These pensions
were not like today’s 401(k)s, or accounts to which
we contribute; rather the trustees collected money
from our employers and held it in trust for us. These
trustees were our “fiduciaries.” We were the “beneficiaries.”
The trustees had duties – ancient legal duties,
of care, prudence, skill, of managing our money for
us. And this old common law became, literally, “the
law of the land.” In 1976, when I graduated from law
school, Congress enacted the Employee Retirement
Income Security Act, or erisa. It was an attempt to
codify all the law of trusts and apply it to Americans
who had these employer funded pensions.
How many Americans? Over half the work
force.
This was arguably the great single piece of
social legislation since the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
perhaps greater even than Medicare, in the possibility of changing the way we lived. And people would
experience this law as one that, in a sense, placed
their future under the care of guardians. Or trustees. For these were the legal roles that corporations
would now play in people’s lives. Except, legally, the
very opposite has now happened.
When labor collapsed, employers stopped
offering pensions, at least of the “defined benefit” kind – a fixed sum, like $2,500 a month, which
the employer had to pay, and it would have to pay
contribution,” a pension, Theresa Ghilarducci of
Notre Dame, has estimated that in 2000, at the
height of the economic boom, the average 401(k)
had no more than $20,000 in it. That is average. She
included the top fifth, where people like me are close
to being millionaires because of their 401(k)s.
This world itself is wildly inegalitarian, and
becoming more so. People at the top build up their
own by taking it from the people below. I mean this
literally. I was recently visited by a 401(k) consultant, who asked me, as he asks other employers, if I
might want to “restructure” our firm’s 401(k) plan,
to “appropriately reward” the “high-end earners.”
In other words, we should take it from the secretaries and give it to ourselves. He had closed the door.
Why not? No one would know.
In this new world, there are no fiduciaries, there
is no one whose role is to insure that you and I can
live comfortably in retirement. We have to fund
our own pensions. In a real sense, with a 401(k),
the trustees are nominal – a signature on a bank
account card. There is no one, no union, no employer to account to us. There are no trustees to look
after us. In this new world, the law is: Employee
Beware. Behind a closed door, the top earners may
be “restructuring.” Or getting rid of the 401(k) altogether. Or in the case of Enron, taking all the chips
and betting them on red.
So what happens? Without any legal accountability, people lose their pensions. It may be that
they work for Enron. Or WorldCom. Or the employer simply one day stops the 401(k) entirely. In any
event, while it may lead to little litigation, this is
a major transformation of legal roles. Employers
are no longer “trustees” in the sense envisioned
by erisa. Employees are no longer “beneficiaries.”
Now the employer is more likely to be selling me his
stock; instead of trustee and fiduciary, we are in the
world of Enron, of seller and purchaser, the world
of consumer fraud.
In this new world, the law is: Employee
Beware. Behind a closed door, the top
earners may be “restructuring.” Or getting rid of the 401(k) altogether. Or in
the case of Enron, taking all the chips and
betting them on red.
– whether or not the funding were there – in 15, or
20, or 30 years. Once the pressure of dealing with a
union vanished, employers either (1) stopped offering any pension, or (2) pushed people into 401(k)s,
or “defined contribution.” (By “defined contribution,” I mean one where the employee pays. The
employer might or might not match.)
In a country where the savings rate today is in
minus numbers, the idea that people – uninsured,
house-poor, or near bankruptcy – would voluntarily fund their own pensions, is one of the most fanciful. So today the “defined benefit” pension is disappearing, at least in the private sector. As to “defined
As we move from the old trust law to the law
of fraud, people in their working lives experience
the world as more arbitrary, more unpredictable.
Indeed, in the very area where the law once protected them most reliably: in their pensions, in their
savings. The form of that savings, alas, is no longer
in a defined benefit but in a 401(k) – in an amount
which may be ludicrously small, or not even there.
For there is no “insured” 40l(k) and very little or no
transparency. Even in the case of gross fraud, the
legal system here provides not much help at all.
Healthcare
In healthcare, too, people feel vulnerable, even
preyed upon. In particular, people no longer expect
the tax-exempt hospital to be a “charitable” institution, as a guardian or protector, in any legal sense.
A major change in the law, or at least the culture, is that the “charitable” hospital behaves
toward the uninsured as badly as many of the “for profit” hospitals.
When critics of the right speak of a Legal Crisis
in America, they often refer to “the trial lawyers” filing suits against hospitals primarily and, to a lesser
If we simply count
up filings, the
real source of the
much-talked-about
Litigation Hell is
the explosion of
suits by hospitals
and doctors going
after patients.
extent, doctors. Medical Malpractice. Lawyers like
Phillip Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense
(1995), are arguing that there is “too much law” and
that lawyers and lawsuits are ruining the nation.
Yes, of course, patients sue hospitals without
restraint, for everything they can get. I find it appalling. But who started this war? Hospitals and doctors sue their patients far more – far, far more – than
their patients sue them.
If we simply count up filings, the real source of
the much-talked-about Litigation Hell is the explosion of suits by hospitals and doctors going after
patients. In my city, Chicago, many law firms exist
just to chase patients: not only to collect bills, but
also to garnish wages, to attach bank accounts, and
in some horrific cases, documented by the Wall
Street Journal, even to put their patients into jail.
And of course, if needs be, to press them into bankruptcy.
The worst offenders are the not-for-profit, religious, charitable institutions, which have huge tax
exemptions and yet proceed against patients without any self-restraint.
How did this happen? As unions collapsed, the
healthcare industry dealt more and more with the
uninsured. Or the underinsured – people whose
“insurance” had deductibles of $5,000. At one time,
as late as the 1950s, charitable hospitals were expected to take care of the poor. Then, with the passage of
the Medicare and Medicaid bills, it seemed the need
for such “charity” would disappear. But with soaring
health costs and the collapse of unions, employers
cut back. Now even the middle class needed “charity.” The result? An explosion of cases, as hospitals,
doctors, filed tens of thousands of suits to collect.
But not only do hospitals and doctors sue. They
sue to collect from the uninsured at two to three
times what they charge their insured patients. The
reason is that Blue Cross, Humana, Medicare, etc.
negotiate huge discounts from the “list” prices,
which are not real prices for most of us. No, these
hospitals charge their inflated prices only to the
uninsured, or underinsured.
Indeed, this litigation, by hospitals, leads to
another litigation explosion: bankruptcy. For, as
Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi point
out in The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class
Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke (2003), this kind
of litigation brought by the doctors and the hospitals is the biggest single reason why Americans go
into bankruptcy. We have a record of 1.5 million
bankruptcy filings a year!
So when patients get the chance to sue the
hospitals in return, why should they act with any
restraint? Of course, it is simplistic to say that in
medical malpractice, the patients are just dishing it
back. No, there are other causes. But the “culture” of
Winner-Take-All has a lot to do with it. And it is the
breakdown of old legal rights, in many areas, that
has led to such a culture.
On behalf of some uninsured plaintiffs, I am
currently bringing a case against a big religious charitable hospital under the Illinois Consumer Fraud Act.
And I have some hope we can make headway. Already,
the State of Illinois has revoked the tax-exempt status
of one such “charitable” hospital. This is a first in the
nation. But this legal battle is in a very early stage.
The Movement from Public to Private Law
This is another reason for Litigation Hell, both in
medical malpractice and other areas. Perhaps I
should call it the movement from administrative law
to tort. Consider the huge numbers of people dropping out of public life. We have less than a majority
is largely because people have the sense that the
state, the government, is not there to protect them.
In many an area, a little more law – not less law –
would end the litigation.
Example: Hospitals. Sometimes I sue for nurses; right now, for a top nurse, a real red hot pepper
of a rabble-rouser, who was fired for complaining
of nurse understaffing. She did not just complain.
She got 160 nurses to sign her petition to the State
of Illinois, claiming that, due to nurse understaffing,
this hospital was in violation of many regulations of
the state department of public health.
By now, my practice is deep in the discovery
phase, digging up the facts on nurse cutbacks. All hospitals do it. How do they get away with it? Four things
now strike me: (1) at hospitals, terrible things happen
when there aren’t enough nurses, (2) the state could,
but chooses not to, have nurse-patient ratios, (3) the
state could, but doesn’t have the money to, enforce
existing health regulations, and (4) the hospital just
deals with malpractice cases instead.
This is the American model. First, we deregulate, or fail to regulate. For example, everyone knows
what nurse-patient ratios should be. Second, even
worse than deregulation, we defund enforcement.
My old law professor Clyde Summers has kept telling us over the years: “You have to understand: it
costs money to have rights.” There is so much twaddle on the right, by lawyers like Phillip Howard,
about our rights-oriented liberalism and government regulation. What rights? At the federal, or the
state level, there’s nothing in the budget for them.
Deregulation as a movement is a minor part of
the weakening of public law. A much bigger problem
is that there is nothing in the budget. In the nurse’s
case, for example, the Illinois Department of Public
Health would like very much to investigate. But there
is no staff. At first, I was incredulous; but there is no
one there. Indeed, the worst part is: Republicans and
Democrats alike cut salaries, make the jobs as bad
This is the American model. First we
deregulate, or fail to regulate. Second,
even worse than deregulation, we defund
enforcement.
vote. Government, or the state, is weaker. There has
been wave after wave of deregulation: patient safety;
food and drug safety; worker safety.
The collapse of public law has led to an explosion of private law – people taking private revenge
for things that the “state” is no longer strong enough
to regulate. Call it the movement from public law to
folk justice. The more we deregulate, the more random and uncontrollable the private litigation.
Again, take the example of medical malpractice.
Critics on the right blame Litigation Hell on a
mindless “rights-oriented” welfare state and all-powerful agencies like the Occupational Health and Safety
Administration, or osha. But osha is toothless.
If, like Europe, we had more of a welfare state,
more of a social democracy, more “law,” we would,
like Europe, have less litigation. If we have so many
suits – so many people going for the jackpot – it
as possible. The result? Either a slot is abolished, or
an incompetent is hired. This only proves Summers’
point: it costs money to have a right.
Public law collapses and then we express shock
when private law, tort, malpractice, move in this
area instead. Not all these private cases are worthy
ones, or even related directly to this withdrawal of
regulation. But because the public law has collapsed,
it creates, reinforces, too much private litigation,
folk justice, vengeance.
And all of this, understandably, makes people
cynical about the law.
If it’s bad on the state level, it’s even worse,
almost laughably worse, on the federal level. Another
of our cases at the moment: we are suing for lowwage, Mexican workers at a chicken factory. Why?
Because they didn’t get 60 days notice that the factory was closing. This violates the warn Act. If there’s
The Berlin Journal
47
The collapse of public law has led to an
explosion of private law – people taking
private revenge for things that the “state”
is no longer strong enough to regulate.
no notice, they get a modest amount of compensation. (By the way, these workers are really poor! )
But the company claims an exception. The
Department of Agriculture “shut us down” for massive health violations – rats, rat droppings, diseased
meat everywhere – and the shutdown was “unforeseeable” under an exception to the law. So the whole
issue is: was the shutdown for massive health violations “unforeseeable”? The ruling of the district
judge – a liberal, a Clinton appointee, of Mexican
descent: Yes, it was unforeseeable. It could not
be “reasonably foreseen” that the Department of
Agriculture would enforce its own regulations! He
dismissed our case!
After all, the Department of Agriculture, under
Clinton, then Bush, has been trying to deregulate
48
food safety. Do less. And there are fewer inspectors.
And no one takes them seriously any more. In other
words, it is “unforeseeable” as a matter of law that
the Department of Agriculture will take any serious steps to enforce its own regulations. By the way,
this lonely doa inspector didn’t shut down the plant
for good. He just closed until the owner could make
repairs. But the owner moved his business to Iowa,
where the doa inspectors would look the other way.
This is my colleague’s case. My only role was
to edit the brief, as I did by striking out the word
“rodent” and putting in the word “rat.” But otherwise, the evidence is horrific. But my point is that
food safety – getting rat droppings off of meat –
was something, once, in America, that public law
could do. Now it can’t. Why? We either deregulate,
or defund. Result? Private lawyers move in instead.
With clients who don’t expect public law to work,
and go for everything they can get.
It is understandable if Americans see the law,
and the legal system, as a kind of roulette wheel.
Given the arbitrary way the law now works, it is
understandable that people take any chance to
swing at each other’s heads.
But when Americans lose faith in the fairness of
the rule of law, it makes America as a country more
dangerous in the world. If we are skeptical of the
rule of law in our day-to-day lives, at home, we will
be even more skeptical of it abroad.
If Europeans are puzzled that Americans disdain their inclination toward international law and
scoff at the European fondness for what Robert
Kagan calls “the Kantian paradise,” they should
remember: we’re the country from Litigation Hell.o
Thomas Geoghegan, a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the Academy
this spring, is a partner in the Chicago law firm of Despres,
Schwartz & Geoghegan. His books include In America’s
Court: How a Civil Lawyer Who Likes to Settle Stumbled into a
Criminal Trial (2002); The Secret Lives of Citizens: Pursuing the
Promise of American Life (2000); and Which Side Are You On?:
Trying to be for Labor When it’s Flat on its Back (1991), to be
reprinted this fall with a new afterword by the author.
Didn’t You Say Desire Is
f
like the elephant fog
shredded north
a white sun going down
Bessemers fired
through clouds horizoned
on my dog-eared stack
It feels good and right
to waste earnest hours
of an early evening’s
daylight saving time
in uncertainty and want
these cranky climates
changing in us while we
haven’t started dinner yet.
–W.S. Di Piero
© Getty Images
The Salome Summit
Mahler and Strauss in Graz, 1906
By Alex Ross
50
W
hen Richard Strauss conducted his sensuously
savage opera Salome in
May 1906, in Graz, the
crowned heads of music
gathered to witness the
occasion. The world
première of Salome had
taken place five months before, in Dresden, whence
word spread that Strauss, the master provocateur of
German music, had created something beyond the
pale – an ultra-dissonant Biblical spectacle, based
on a play by a recently deceased British degenerate
whose name was not to be mentioned in polite company; a work so frightful in its depiction of adolescent
necrophilia that imperial censors had banned it from
the Court Opera in Vienna.
Gustav Mahler, the Director of the Court
Opera, attended with his wife, the beautiful and
controversial Alma. Giacomo Puccini, the matineeidol creator of La Bohème and Tosca, made a trip
north to hear what “terrible cacophony” his German
rival had concocted.1 The bold young composer
Arnold Schoenberg arrived from Vienna with his
brother-in-law, Alexander von Zemlinsky, and no
fewer than six of his pupils.2 One of them, Alban
Berg, traveled with an older friend, Hermann
Watznauer, who left a memoir of the occasion,
describing the “feverish impatience and boundless
excitement” that all were feeling as the evening
approached. Raoul Auernheimer, a protégé of
Arthur Schnitzler, was one of several rising literary
stars in attendance. The widow of the waltz king
Johann Strauss, no relation to the composer of
Salome, represented old Vienna. Ordinary musicenthusiasts filled out the crowd – “young people
from Vienna, whose only hand luggage consisted of
the [opera’s] piano score,” Strauss noted. Among
them may have been an Austrian teenager named
Adolf Hitler, who had just seen Mahler conduct
Tristan and Isolde in Vienna, on the night of May 8.
Hitler later told Strauss’s son and daughter-in-law
that he had borrowed money from relatives to make
the trip to Graz.3
There was even a fictional character present
– Adrian Leverkühn, the hero of Thomas Mann’s
novel Doctor Faustus, a tale of a composer in league
with the devil.
O
***
n the sixteenth of May, the weather was
uncertain. There was rain in the morning, sun in the afternoon. That morning’s Grazer Tagespost carried news from
Croatia, where a Serbo-Croat alliance was gathering
force, and from Russia, where the Tsar had recently dissolved the Duma. The English minister of war,
Lord Haldane, was quoted as saying that he “knows
Germany and loves Germany’s literature and philosophy” and that he could recite passages of Goethe’s
Faust by heart.
Strauss and Mahler, the titans of AustroGerman music, spent the day in the hills above
the city, accompanied by Alma, who recorded the
encounter in her famous memoirs. A photographer
captured them outside the opera house, apparently preparing to set out on their expedition – Strauss
smiling in a boater hat, Mahler squinting in the sun.
The company visited a waterfall and had lunch in
an old inn, where they sat at a plain wooden table.
They must have made a strange pair: Strauss, tall
and lanky, with a weak chin, a bulbous, balding forehead, strong but sunken eyes; Mahler a full head
shorter, a muscular hawk of a man, the picture of
genius in the flesh. As the sun began to go down,
Mahler became nervous about the time, and he suggested that the party should head back to the Hotel
Elefant, where they were staying, in order to prepare
for the performance. “They can’t start without me,”
Strauss said. “Let ‘em wait.” Mahler replied: “If you
won’t go, then I will – and conduct in your place.”
Alma assumed that Strauss was concealing his anxiety behind a facade of nonchalance.
Strauss was 41, Mahler was 44. They were in
most respects polar opposites. Mahler was a kaleidoscope of moods – childlike, heaven-storming,
despotic, despairing. As he walked agitatedly from
his apartment on the Schwarzenbergplatz to the
opera house on the Ringstrasse, cab drivers would
whisper to their passengers, “Der Mahler!” Strauss
was earthy, self-satisfied, more than a little cynical, a closed book to most observers. The soprano
Gemma Bellincioni, who sat next to him at a banquet after the performance in Graz, described him
in her memoirs as “a pure kind of German, without poses, without long-winded speeches, little gossip and no inclination to talk about himself and
his work, a gaze of steel, an indecipherable expression.” Strauss came from Munich, a backward place
in the eyes of sophisticated Viennese such as Gustav
and Alma. Alma underlined this impression in her
memoirs by rendering Strauss’s dialogue in a ridiculous Bavarian dialect. Not surprisingly, the relationship between the two composers suffered from constant misunderstandings. Mahler would recoil from
unintended slights; Strauss would puzzle over the
sudden silences that would ensue. He was still trying to understand Mahler some four decades later
when he came across Alma’s book and annotated it.
“All untrue,” he wrote, next to the description of his
behavior in Graz.
“Strauss and I tunnel from opposite sides of the
mountain,” Mahler said, according to Alma. “One
day we shall meet.” In spite of their differences, the
two had a common bond. They both saw music
as a medium of conflict, a battlefield of extremes.
They marshaled all the grandeur of romanticism, yet they questioned the heroic Beethovenian
pose. They were both populists with a pessimistic streak – they felt nostalgia for a world that had
not yet been destroyed. Their shared aura of might
and melancholy may explain the fascination that
each one held for the other. Strauss’s first major
act upon becoming President of the Allgemeiner
Deutscher Musikverein, or General German Music
Association, in 1901, was to program Mahler’s
Third Symphony for the festival the following year;
indeed, Mahler’s works dominated the Association’s
programs for several years running. So much
Mahler was played under Strauss’s watch that some
critics took to calling the ADMV the Allgemeiner
Deutscher Mahlerverein. Others dubbed it the
Annual German Carnival of Cacophony.4 Mahler
was especially impressed by Salome, which Strauss
had played and sung for him the previous year. He
wanted it to be one of the main events of his Vienna
tenure. But the censors balked at an opera in which
Biblical characters are made to perform unspeakable acts. Furious, Mahler began hinting that his
days in Vienna were numbered. In March he wrote
to Strauss: “You would not believe how vexatious
this matter has been for me, or (between us) what
consequences it may have for me.”
So Salome came to Graz. The State Theater
staged the opera at the suggestion of the critic Ernst
Decsey, an associate of Mahler, who assured the
management that it would create a succès de scandale. “The city was in a state of nervous excitement,”
Decsey wrote in his autobiography, Music Was His
Life. “Parties formed and split. Pub philosophers
buzzed with curiosity about events at the opera
house…. From the provinces came visitors; from
Vienna came critics, press people, reporters, and
foreigners.… Three sold-out houses – overbooked,
actually. Porters groaned, and hoteliers reached for
the keys to their safes.” The critic himself fueled the
anticipation with a high-flown preview article in the
Grazer Tagespost on May 16, acclaiming Strauss’s
“tone-color world,” his “polyrhythms and polyphony,” his “bursting out of the narrowness of the old
tonality,” his “fetish ideal of an Omni-Tonality.”
As dusk fell, Mahler and Strauss appeared at
the opera house. They had rushed back to town
in their chauffeur-driven car. The crowd milling
around beforehand had an air of nervous electricity.
As Decsey recounted in the next day’s paper, the
orchestra played a fanfare when Strauss walked up to
the podium, and the audience applauded stormily.
Then a deathly silence descended, the clarinet played
a softly slithering scale, and the curtain went up.
T
***
he tale of the Princess of Judaea, who dances the “Dance of the Seven Veils” for her stepfather Herod and demands the head of John
the Baptist as reward, had surfaced several times in opera, notably in Massenet’s sentimental
epic Hérodiade. But Strauss’ version took a flamboyantly modern view of the Biblical tale. Scrupulously
faithful to the Oscar Wilde play, it gave voice to some
of the most delirious and decadent fantasies of turnof-the-century Symbolist art. In the bohemian lexicon, the figure of Salome, who in the Book of Matthew
appears as nothing more than the servant of her
mother’s vengeance, had turned into a heroine of outlaw desire. The diseased atmosphere of Herod’s court,
likewise, had come to reflect prevalent pseudo-scientific conceptions of society as a degenerate mass.
Gustave Moreau produced a famous canvas in which
Salome appeared as a queenly vampire, her perversity
muffled by extravagant style. Stéphane Mallarmé, the
godfather of the Symbolist movement, took up the
legend in “Hérodiade,” making it a scene of oblique,
esoteric decay. J.-K. Huysmans popularized Moreau
and Mallarmé’s visions in À Rebours, a novel that doubled as a kind of how-to manual for mal vivants. Jules
Laforgue both savored and mocked the Salome fad
in his Moral Tales, adding a gruesome detail that furnished the climax of Strauss’ opera: when the head
is brought to the princess on a platter, she leans over
and kisses it. She is a victim, Laforgue wryly concludes, of “the desire to live in a world of artifice and
not in a simple, wholesome one like the rest of us.”
The Berlin Journal
51
W
ilde wrote his play in 1891, saturating it in the rich, gnomic imagery of
Symbolism. “While everything in your
Salome is executed in endlessly dazzling strokes,” Mallarmé wrote to him, “there also
arises, on each page, the unsayable and the Dream.”
The Irishman brought his own obsessions to bear,
notably a scandalous eroticization of the male body.
Wilde became the great unmentionable in England,
but on the Continent his writing enjoyed a vogue,
acquiring propaganda value for those who wished
for a general loosening of bourgeois mores. Max
Reinhardt produced the play in Berlin in 1902;
Richard Strauss saw that production, and, after getting hold of Hedwig Lachmann’s forceful German
translation, began setting it to music word for word.
Next to the first line, “How beautiful is the princess
Salome tonight,” Strauss made a note to use the
key of C-sharp minor,5 although it would turn out
to be a different sort of C-sharp minor than Bach’s
or Beethoven’s.
Strauss always had a flair for beginnings. He
wrote what may be, after the first four notes of
Beethoven’s Fifth, the most famous opening flourish of all: the “mountain sunrise” from Thus Spake
Zarathustra. That music had elemental power
because it was grounded in basic phenomena of
sound. The opening phrase reproduces the hierarchy of “natural” harmonic tones, which Pythagoras
named the “harmony of the spheres”; out of them
blazes a towering chord of C major, which has within it all the majesty of nature. Stanley Kubrick, in his
film 2001, let Strauss’ music speak for nothing less
than the cosmos itself. Salome, written nine years
after Zarathustra, whisks us away into a very different
and much more artificial world. The first notes are
nothing more than a rising scale, but it is a very peculiar scale that had probably never appeared in music
before. The first half belongs to the key of C# major;
the second to the key of G; then C# resumes, but in
the minor. What makes the combination more than
a little unnerving is the presence of the tritone interval lurking at the heart of it – what medieval scholars called diabolus in musica, the musical devil. For
centuries, composers had relied upon the tritone to
suggest forces of darkness, to summon up an atmosphere of fear. Something about the mutual thrum
of the notes G and C# creates an uneasy vibration, a
nasty, invasive edge. George Gershwin had recourse
to it when he wrote that most devilishly charming of
Mephistophelean arias, “It Ain’t N e-c e s-sarily So….”
Strauss went further: he juxtaposes two distinct keys
along this axis. Which is to say, each note in the C#major set is distant by a tritone from the notes of the
G-major set. By beginning with this collision of keys,
Strauss signals that Salome’s world is cracked down
the middle.
The little run of notes at once suggests a world
where bodies and ideas circulate freely, where opposites meet. There is a hint of the glitter and swirl
of city life – the debonairly gliding clarinet looks
forward to the jazzy character who sets in motion
Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. At the same time, this
scale suggests a collision of belief systems, a meeting
of irreconcilables. Salome takes place at the intersection of Roman, Jewish, and Christian societies, and a
violent outcome is assured. Most acutely, the Salome
scale goes inside of the unsettled mind of one who
wishes to devour all the contradictions of her world.
52
Strauss was not the first to write in this way: Wagner
used similar combinations of chords to portray
Hagen, in Götterdämmerung, who wishes to seize the
Ring and conquer the world. And in Mussorgsky’s
Boris Godunov, a pendulum swing across the tritone
symbolizes the sinister splendor of the murderer
Tsar. The lurching opening chords of Puccini’s Tosca
show the malevolence of Baron Scarpia, who bends
the institutions of Church and State to his private
passion. Strauss had a penchant for such clashing
chords from the beginning of his career; in his tone
poem Don Quixote, they blare forth at the moment
the Don takes leave of his senses and begins his tilting at windmills.
Salome maintains a sulphurous, changeable
atmosphere throughout. The real tour-de-force
comes with the entrance of Herod, Salome’s degenerate stepfather, halfway through the opera. He
comes out on the terrace; looks for the Princess;
gazes at the Moon, which is “reeling through the
clouds like a drunken woman”; orders wine, slips in
blood, stumbles over the body of a soldier who has
committed suicide; feels cold, feels a wind – there
is a hallucination of wings beating the air. It’s quiet
again; then more wind, more visions. The orchestra plays fragments of waltzes, expressionistic clusters of dissonance, impressionistic washes of sound.
There is a turbulent contrapuntal episode as the
Jews in Herod’s court dispute the meaning of the
Baptist’s prophecies. Two Nazarenes respond with
the Christian point of view; Strauss, a committed atheist, later commented that he intended this
music to be as boring as possible. Salome dances her
dance: it’s a little kitschy and a little gruesome. She
demands the head of the prophet as a reward, and
Herod furiously tries to change her mind. She refuses. Soldiers prepare to behead the Baptist in his cistern prison. At this point, the bottom drops out of
the music altogether. A toneless bass-drum rumble
and strangulated cries in the double basses build
to a gigantic smear of sound that covers most of the
spectrum of available tones.
Now the head of John the Baptist lies before
Salome on a silver platter. The harmony steadies
itself on luminous C sharp, where the opera began.
Strauss’ Hitchcockian manipulation of our expectations goes a step farther: having shocked us with
unheard-of dissonances, he now disturbs us with
plain chords of necrophiliac bliss. For all the roiling ugliness of the setting, this is still a love story,
of a perverse kind, and the composer honors his
heroine’s emotions. “The mystery of love,” Salome
sings, “is greater than the mystery of death.” Herod
spits out his fear and loathing of the degenerate
spectacle that his own incestuous lust has generated. “Hide the moon, hide the stars!” he rasps.
“Something terrible is going to happen!” He turns
his back and begins to walk up the great staircase of
the palace. The moon, obeying his command, goes
behind the clouds. An extraordinary noise emanates
in the trombones: the opera’s introductory motif
is crunched together as one dark, glowering chord.
Above it, Salome’s love themes begin to blossom
again, like flowers in rubble. But, at the moment of
the fatal kiss, something goes awry: two different
chord progressions, either of which would sound
unremarkable on its own, unfold simultaneously in
different parts of the orchestra. A fresh nightmare
of dissonance results – a mix of the ordinary and
the unspeakable. It is like a hideous face in a crowded room. A moment later, the moon reemerges, illuminating the scene. Herod, poised at the top of the
stairs, turns around, looks, and screams, “Kill that
woman!” The opera ends with eight bars of noise.
Although music historians tend to sanctify the
premieres of Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet,
in 1908, and of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, in 1913,
as modernism’s revolutionary musical moments,
Salome came first, and it foreshadowed practically everything that came after. As T. S. Eliot said of
Ulysses, it killed the nineteenth century.
T
***
he crowd roared its approval – that was
the most shocking thing. “Nothing more
satanic and ‘artistic’ has been seen on the
German opera stage,” Ernst Decsey wrote
in his review the next day. After the performance,
the composer held court at the Hotel Elefant, with
a never-to-be-repeated company that included
Mahler, Puccini, and Schoenberg. When someone
declared that he would rather shoot himself than
memorize the part of Salome, Strauss answered to
general amusement, “Me, too” – at least according
to the memoirs of the conservative Austrian composer Wilhelm Kienzl. The following day, he wrote
triumphantly to his wife: “It is raining, and I am sitting on the garden terrace of my hotel, in order to
report to you that ‘Salome’ went well, gigantic success, people applauding for ten minutes until the
fire curtain came down, etc., etc.” Although some
dissenting voices were heard – Kienzl called the
opera “an almost shameless glorification of sexual psychopathy” – no real scandal ensued.6 Salome
went on to be performed, in its first few years of
existence, in some 25 different cities. The success
was so great that Strauss was even able to laugh off
criticism from Kaiser Wilhelm II. “I am sorry that
Strauss composed this Salome,” the Kaiser reportedly said. “Normally I’m very keen on him, but this
is going to do him a lot of damage.” Strauss related
this story in his memoirs, adding with a flourish:
“Thanks to this damage I was able to build my villa
in Garmisch!” Indeed, thanks to rapidly accumulating royalties, he was able to build a beautiful house
in the Alpine resort village, beneath the Zugspitze,
Germany’s highest mountain.
“Graz has covered itself in glory,” Mahler was
heard to say when the performance was over. And
yet, Alma recounts that on the train back to Vienna,
Strauss’ colleague sounded bewildered by the
opera’s success. He had no doubt that Salome was
a significant and daring work – “one of the greatest masterworks of our time,” he later said. Thus, he
could not understand how it could have won over
the public. In the same carriage, Alma continues,
was the short-story writer and poet Peter Rosegger,
whom Mahler admired intensely. The composer
voiced his unease, and Rosegger replied, “Vox populi,
vox dei” – the voice of the people is the voice of God.
Mahler asked whether he meant the voice of people at the present moment or the voice of the people over time. No one seemed to know the answer
to that question. In a contemporary article about
Salome, Rosegger declared that Strauss had transfigured a horrible, non-German, “foreign” subject with
the force of his personality. Mahler seemed to feel the same: “I cannot rhyme it all together for myself, and can only surmise that it is the
voice of the Erdgeist sounding from the heart of genius....”
The younger musicians from Vienna were elated by what they
had heard, though they were careful to temper their enthusiasm with
skepticism. A group of them, Alban Berg included, talked until the
early hours of the morning in the Thalia Restaurant next to the theater. They might have used the words of Adrian Leverkühn, the devilbound hero of Mann’s Doctor Faustus, who spoke as follows: “What a
talented good old boy! The happy-go-lucky revolutionary, cocky and
conciliatory. Never were the avant-garde and the box office so well
acquainted. Shocks and discords aplenty – then he good-naturedly
takes it all back and assures the philistines that no harm was intended. But a hit, a definite hit.” As for Adolf Hitler, nothing is known
about his reaction at the time. (I take up this problem in another
chapter of my forthcoming book.) We cannot know for certain if he
was even there. But when Salome was banned from the stage of the
Graz Opera in 1939 on the grounds that it was “too Jewish,” Strauss
made the story of the Führer’s youthful enthusiasm known, and the
opera was reinstated.
Whether or not the Devil himself attended, Salome was a highly charged occasion. Past and future were colliding; two centuries
were passing in the night. Mahler would die in 1911, seeming to take
the entire romantic era with him. Puccini’s Turandot, unfinished at
his death in 1924, would more or less end a glorious Italian operatic
history that began in Florence at the end of the sixteenth century. In
1909, Schoenberg would inaugurate a difficult new atonal language
and find himself violently at odds with the Vox populi. Hitler, who,
circa 1906, was a dreamy aesthete with no known political pretensions, would attempt the annihilation of a people and a world. And
Strauss would survive to a surreal and bewildered old age – “I have
actually outlived myself,” he said in 1948. At the time that he was
born, Germany was not yet a unified nation and Wagner was still
composing the Ring of the Nibelung. At the time of Strauss’s death,
Germany had split into East and West, and American soldiers were
whistling Sinatra tunes in the streets.
A few years ago, I stopped for a night in Graz. Puccini’s Turandot
was playing at the opera house, in a bizarre production set in a futuristic pop-culture world of ultraviolent football games and striptease
cheerleaders. The next morning, I went looking for the Hotel Elefant;
I had the idea that I might be able to find an old hotel ledger in which
all those famous names could still be read. But the Elefant was now
the site of the local offices of the Austrian Trade Union Federation,
and the ledger had disappeared. “Ja, there was a hotel here,” the
ancient desk clerk told me. “Eighteenth century. Nineteenth century.
Long time ago.”
Standing in the parking lot where the garden used to be, I struggled to picture that rainy morning in 1906, when Richard Strauss
said good-bye to Gustav Mahler and sat contentedly on the terrace
for a while. o
/ Zupacken: Basel // –
herausforderungen
als Chance nutzen! /
An Basel II führt kein Weg vorbei. Richten Sie Ihr Unternehmen
jetzt schon darauf aus – mit
commerzbank rating:coach.
Schwachstellen analysieren, Empfehlungen
entwickeln, Optimierungspotenziale konsequent ausschöpfen. So gewinnen Sie Zukunft.
/ ideen nach vorn /
1. Puccini in a letter of May 17, 1906, Puccini: 276 lettere inedite, Giuseppe Pintorno, ed.
(Milan: Nuovo Edizioni, 1974), p. 130.
2. The names of five Schoenberg students – Heinrich Jalowetz, Karl Horwitz, Erwin
Stein, Viktor Krüger, and Zdzislaw Jachimecki – were listed in the Grazer Tagespost’s
“Fremde Liste” (list of visitors) on May 18. The sixth student was Alban Berg.
3. Manfred Blumauer asked Alice Strauss, Strauss’s daughter-in-law, whether she could
confirm that Hitler told her husband this story, and she said that she witnessed the
conversation herself. Blumauer, Festa Teatrale: Musiktheater in Graz (Graz: Edition
Strahalm, 1998), p. 77.
4. “Mahlerverein”: Bryan Gilliam, The Life of Richard Strauss (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1999), p. 75. “Cacophony”: Musical Times, July 1, 1906, p. 486.
5. Roland Tenschert, “Strauss as Librettist,” in Richard Strauss, Salome, Derrick Puffett,
ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), p. 47.
6. Wilhelm Kienzl quoted in Hans von Dettelbach, Steirische Begegnungen
(Graz: Leykam Verlag, 1966), p. 207.
Alex Ross is music critic for the New Yorker magazine and was
Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in the fall of 2003.
His book on twentieth-century music, The Rest is Noise,
is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Commerzbank AG, Filiale Berlin,
Potsdamer Straße 125, 10783 Berlin
Ansprechpartner: Hans Hagen,
Telefon (0 30) 26 53-39 31
/ / / / / / / / / / / / www.firmenkunden.commerzbank.de / / / / / / / / / / / /
The Berlin Journal
53
© Getty Images
Ode to a Fifth-Grade Teacher
Elizabeth McCracken
54
S
he was a glamorous monument of a woman. Kids, it’s true,
know fat people. Kids are like birders when it comes to fat: there’s a
pleasure in an identification, especially, for instance, if your mother has not noticed the fat person. (“That man is really fat. Why is
that man really fat?”)
But Miss Caprietti was more puzzling. Chances were she wore
larger underpants than anyone I had ever met, and yet her neck
and face belonged to some thin Italian movie star. Taut. Lovely.
Flawless. (Plastic surgery? Maybe so. A little fat vacuuming. If
you’d described such things to me then – “they take a little plastic
tube and suck out your lard” – you would have been greeted with
the kind of incredulity such preposterous information deserves.)
She wore a giant shellacked black hairdo that was called, she
explained to her fans, i.e., all the fifth grade girls, The Artichoke.
Who knew hairdos had names? Only the keels of her ears poked
out from underneath The Artichoke. Her lipstick was very red.
As far as her actual circumference – well, the magma at the center of the earth is very hot, but cannot be gauged in actual degrees,
Centigrade, Celsius, or Kelvin. She wore floor length dresses – this
was in 1986; she was the only one – that suggested a large silhouette without ever catching on a single angle of her body. Then she’d
add a thin shawl, or a large translucent scarf, or – she had a series of
these – an object of clothing that was halfway between a jacket and
a wrap. She never fell for the fat lady’s folly, the vest. Sometimes
she wore short kimonos. She looked like a pitched circus tent, her
strident neck the center pole.
I worshipped her.
I wasn’t alone: every year Miss Caprietti held a poll, and every year she edged out Mother Teresa as the Most
Admired Woman among the girls in her class. (She told us ahead of time that she always won the polls; we might
not have thought of voting for her, but once she mentioned it, Of course!) She was, she said, an expert on Netsilik
Eskimos, Herring Gulls, and Volcanoes, all of which we would study that year. To study Netsilik Eskimos under
Miss Caprietti, we understood, was like studying electricity under Edison.
It is only now that I realize that she was an expert because she read the textbooks ahead of us.
Mornings, we had “assembly” on the “carpet” in the middle of the classroom. The whole place was wall-to-walled;
by “carpet” Miss Caprietti meant an area in the middle free of chairs. We assembled cross-legged in front of her.
Then she stood at the front and told us our plans for the day; she reported whether the Good Ship Miss Caprietti’s
Fifth Grade Class was suffering from any discipline problem; then she closed her eyes and clasped her hands and
said – very quietly, but aloud – the Lord’s Prayer. (Maybe she did this for my benefit, poor little pagan. Everyone
else was Catholic.) Afterwards, we went to our desks and she went to hers, where she applied her lipstick, peering
into a red plastic sphere-shaped mirror that sat on the corner of her desk. She had all the time in the world to perfect her mouth. We had to read about Eskimos, after all, but she already knew everything.
At morning assembly, watching her pray, her head even tinier from perspective, I dreamed of climbing under her
skirt and warming my hands on her mysterious ankles. I talked my mother, who made my clothes, into sewing me
a few floor-length skirts, so I could be as grand as her. o
Elizabeth McCracken is Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow at the Academy this term and author of two novels, Niagara Falls all Over Again (2001)
and The Giant’s House (1996), a volume of short stories, Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry (1997) and numerous other stories and articles.
The Berlin Journal
55
Film stills from Burn (2002), by current Academy fellow Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley
56
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Spring 2004 - The Rest Is Noise

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